Linux users keep saying you don’t need antivirus on Linux and that Linux is more secure and safe. This intrigues me, as I’m moving to Linux, but I never hear any technical reasons as to why this would be. All I see is “there are no viruses because it’s a small platform”. That’s not an argument for the security of the platform so I’m curious to know if there are any technical reasons Linux would be more secure. Every now and then I read about some malware for Linux, so they do definitely exist.
The underlying user/group systems are a little more secure, containerization is common and easy (flatpak, bubblewrap, and firejail), the attack surface is lower, the marketshare is smaller, and repositories are fundamentally superior. Of these, app repositories and the market share are by far the biggest factors.
Getting malware on Linux isn’t totally unheard of, but it is extremely uncommon. I’ve never had any, nor has anyone I know. This guy isn’t the first person I’ve heard of getting malware on Linux, but he is one of very, very few.
one added benefit of Linux: It doesn’t - on a default installation - enable tons of services the user will probably never need. These services on Windows listen on the internet connection for incoming requests (e.g. remote desktop service), or are available locally for other exploits.
One of the reasons Windows “just works” (well…) is because literally EVERYTHING is preconfigured and activated on startup. That’s also one of the reasons why the system is such a resource hogging piece of work…
It’s a work of hours to manually go through system services and identify & disable everything you will not need.
All I see is “there are no viruses because it’s a small platform”.
It’s also a total lie. Do you know how many Linux servers there are in the world? It’s a lot. Same for Android devices.
While these aren’t quite the same, and thus not the same vulnerabilities as desktop Linux, they do provide some insights into the effectiveness of its security model.
It’s not the case that viruses can’t exist on Linux, it’s just very improbable through normal usage. The key difference is that the overwhelming majority of software installed on Linux is through a package manager, which is a tool that downloads software from a maintained, trusted, and vetted repository of software. So instead of googling “Firefox download”, clicking on (hopefully) the right link (and getting this right gets harder and harder with Google fucking up search results), and downloading the software from the website, you simply execute a command in your terminal like apt install firefox (for Debian-based systems, command can vary by distro you’re using) and it pulls the software from a trusted repository. This alone eliminates the most common attack vectors, since usually Windows users get viruses by downloading random executables off the internet.
Generally, the way you get viruses on a Linux system are through finding/exploiting vulnerabilities in software which is very hard to pull off generally and are usually resolved fairly quickly once they’re discovered (And of course, Linux is not unique in this respect, any computer can be target of such attacks).
There’s little technical reason, at least no security features were ever tested on the scale Windows is every day.
The real reason is nobody bothers to target Linux desktop users because there’s dozens of us (dozens!) while there’s billions of Windows users. It’s about efficiently spending your money and time while investing into crime.
I didn’t, but I considering the world’s workforce is around 3 1/2 billion people, and that in the developed world, the percentage of office jobs is around or below 50%, however the majority of the world’s work force live in underdeveloped parts of the world, I would estimate the total number of worldwide office workspaces to be significantly below a billion.
And - even the number Microsoft themselves claim, appears to be only 1.5 billion total per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems - with this particular quote in the article (emphasis by me):
On 27 January 2016, Paul Thurrott summarized the operating system market, the day after Apple announced “one billion devices”:
Apple’s “active installed base” is now one billion devices. […] Granted, some of those Apple devices were probably sold into the market place years ago. But that 1 billion figure can and should be compared to the numbers Microsoft touts for Windows 10 (200 million, most recently) or Windows more generally (1.5 billion active users, a number that hasn’t moved, magically, in years), and that Google touts for Android (over 1.4 billion, as of September). My understanding of iOS is that the user base was previously thought to be around 800 million strong, and when you factor out Macs and other non-iOS Apple devices, that’s probably about right. But as you can see, there are three big personal computing platforms.
I think it’s fair to say that “billionS” is a bit of an exaggeration - that’s all I meant to point out.
240 million PCs were shipped last year, with about 10% being Apple. A negligible number run Linux. If we assume 5 years average life, that’s still easily a billion active Windows devices.
That said, devices may not be the best metric. You mentioned users, which may use many devices. For instance, I use a Windows laptop at work, Windows desktop at home, Android on my phone.
I would use web server metrics, which are an approximate indicator of time spent on each OS.
I believe the yearly tally from some company aggregating website traffic came out a few months back and linux had climbed over 4% of desktop usage. Linux gamers have outnumbered mac users on steam for close to a year now.
Haven’t looked to see if there are other replies yet, but the primary reason, back when I ditched windows completely 20+ years ago, was that the worst that could happen with linux malware or a ‘virus’ would be the user’s home directory becoming compromised. Due to posix permissions they would have no ability to take down your entire system as would happen with windows pretty much all the time if you clicked the wrong button on a pop-up. I still have to use windows for work and from what I see (and from the successful ransomware attacks that have happened due to people opening an email attachment) I can’t imagine that has changed a lot.
If you set up system backups of user directories then the damage could be mitigated relatively quickly and easily. These days with flatpaks and browsers (well, firefox at least) having built-in and by-default sandboxing then even your home directory is pretty safe.
Linux users keep saying you don’t need antivirus on Linux and that Linux is more secure and safe. This intrigues me, as I’m moving to Linux, but I never hear any technical reasons as to why this would be. All I see is “there are no viruses because it’s a small platform”. That’s not an argument for the security of the platform so I’m curious to know if there are any technical reasons Linux would be more secure. Every now and then I read about some malware for Linux, so they do definitely exist.
Here is why :)
Congratz, you found a really shitty malware.
I don’t think that’s lockbit quality.
The underlying user/group systems are a little more secure, containerization is common and easy (flatpak, bubblewrap, and firejail), the attack surface is lower, the marketshare is smaller, and repositories are fundamentally superior. Of these, app repositories and the market share are by far the biggest factors.
Getting malware on Linux isn’t totally unheard of, but it is extremely uncommon. I’ve never had any, nor has anyone I know. This guy isn’t the first person I’ve heard of getting malware on Linux, but he is one of very, very few.
one added benefit of Linux: It doesn’t - on a default installation - enable tons of services the user will probably never need. These services on Windows listen on the internet connection for incoming requests (e.g. remote desktop service), or are available locally for other exploits.
One of the reasons Windows “just works” (well…) is because literally EVERYTHING is preconfigured and activated on startup. That’s also one of the reasons why the system is such a resource hogging piece of work…
It’s a work of hours to manually go through system services and identify & disable everything you will not need.
It’s also a total lie. Do you know how many Linux servers there are in the world? It’s a lot. Same for Android devices.
While these aren’t quite the same, and thus not the same vulnerabilities as desktop Linux, they do provide some insights into the effectiveness of its security model.
It’s not the case that viruses can’t exist on Linux, it’s just very improbable through normal usage. The key difference is that the overwhelming majority of software installed on Linux is through a package manager, which is a tool that downloads software from a maintained, trusted, and vetted repository of software. So instead of googling “Firefox download”, clicking on (hopefully) the right link (and getting this right gets harder and harder with Google fucking up search results), and downloading the software from the website, you simply execute a command in your terminal like
apt install firefox(for Debian-based systems, command can vary by distro you’re using) and it pulls the software from a trusted repository. This alone eliminates the most common attack vectors, since usually Windows users get viruses by downloading random executables off the internet.Generally, the way you get viruses on a Linux system are through finding/exploiting vulnerabilities in software which is very hard to pull off generally and are usually resolved fairly quickly once they’re discovered (And of course, Linux is not unique in this respect, any computer can be target of such attacks).
There’s little technical reason, at least no security features were ever tested on the scale Windows is every day.
The real reason is nobody bothers to target Linux desktop users because there’s dozens of us (dozens!) while there’s billions of Windows users. It’s about efficiently spending your money and time while investing into crime.
between smartphones replacing desktop PCs and mac computers, I doubt that there’s “billions” of windows users left in reality.
don’t forget all the office drones, who are also the main target of scammers
I didn’t, but I considering the world’s workforce is around 3 1/2 billion people, and that in the developed world, the percentage of office jobs is around or below 50%, however the majority of the world’s work force live in underdeveloped parts of the world, I would estimate the total number of worldwide office workspaces to be significantly below a billion. And - even the number Microsoft themselves claim, appears to be only 1.5 billion total per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems - with this particular quote in the article (emphasis by me):
I think it’s fair to say that “billionS” is a bit of an exaggeration - that’s all I meant to point out.
240 million PCs were shipped last year, with about 10% being Apple. A negligible number run Linux. If we assume 5 years average life, that’s still easily a billion active Windows devices.
That said, devices may not be the best metric. You mentioned users, which may use many devices. For instance, I use a Windows laptop at work, Windows desktop at home, Android on my phone.
I would use web server metrics, which are an approximate indicator of time spent on each OS.
I believe the yearly tally from some company aggregating website traffic came out a few months back and linux had climbed over 4% of desktop usage. Linux gamers have outnumbered mac users on steam for close to a year now.
As I said, I took issue with the plural in billionS :) that typically implies “more than two” when it’s likely to be closer to 1.
poor you :)
Haven’t looked to see if there are other replies yet, but the primary reason, back when I ditched windows completely 20+ years ago, was that the worst that could happen with linux malware or a ‘virus’ would be the user’s home directory becoming compromised. Due to posix permissions they would have no ability to take down your entire system as would happen with windows pretty much all the time if you clicked the wrong button on a pop-up. I still have to use windows for work and from what I see (and from the successful ransomware attacks that have happened due to people opening an email attachment) I can’t imagine that has changed a lot.
If you set up system backups of user directories then the damage could be mitigated relatively quickly and easily. These days with flatpaks and browsers (well, firefox at least) having built-in and by-default sandboxing then even your home directory is pretty safe.