I secure systems for my day job. That means installing AV software, ensuring Windows Firewall is ON, etc. (Plus many other things…)

I’ve seen discussions around disk encryption here, but I don’t recall much about a malware protection. Maybe a little about personal (desktop) firewalls.

I’m aware of Clam, etc, but is anyone actually using these tools much?

Or are we just presuming we’re all immune from the bad guys targeting Windows?

  • Grangle1@lemm.ee
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    9 months ago

    <Or are we just presuming we’re all immune from the bad guys targeting Windows?>

    Yes, I find that does tend to be the attitude among most Linux articles/videos/etc I see on the subject. There’s some truth to it, in that from what I understand Linux is immune to much of it, but it’s not entirely true. Malware for Linux does exist, so IMO people should not be as complacent about malware as many seem to be, but the community based open-source nature of most Linux software helps mitigate it SOMEWHAT (NOT entirely, because it’s dependent on trusting the community to both want to defend against it and have the skill to do so). Unlike Windows malware defense (to a degree, Windows patches have gotten leagues better than in the past), the primary way Linux stops malware is removing vulnerabilities before they can be exploited. It’s another reason you won’t see nearly as much Linux malware showing up as on Windows: it can’t spread if there’s no exploit to spread through. I do still run Clam and a firewall primarily for my own peace of mind because on my system aside from Clamd using a crap-ton of RAM they don’t really slow it down to a visible degree. Long story short, Linux malware is indeed much rarer than Windows malware, but it does exist and I’m not keen on Linux media people giving the impression that security isn’t something to watch for with Linux for the average user.

    • Possibly linux
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      9 months ago

      The biggest threat on Linux is social engineering. It doesn’t take much to get someone to open a file on Linux.