[maemo-users] Nokia device usage

[From: James Knott]

kenneth marken wrote:
>>
>> Bottom line, there are a lot of technical and usage reasons that make it
>> much harder for malware to attack Linux/Unix.
>>
>>
> the "big" problem here is that the target for said malware have
> changed...
>
> its no longer about bringing down whole systems. these days its the
> users data they are after. credit card info, codes of all kinds, and
> just about anything else.
>
> was there not a sweep of ransom attacks where a worm would archive the
> whole content of the users document dir, and encrypt the archive?
> leaving a message to send x amount of money to some account for the
> password?
>
> under these situations, read access is more then enough access, most
> of the time.
>
> the only option i can see for the user then is to run every program he
> tries to make use of online, inside some kind of chroot can. but even
> thats not perfect.
>
> basically, the only really safe option is to yank that plug, and use
> only home-coded apps...

Again, it's harder.  In Outlook, for example, a virus attached to an
email could run as soon as the message was read, without the user having
to do anything.  For a virus to run in Linux, the user would have to:
1) detach the file
2) make it executable
3) manually run it

In short, it won't run without the user taking 3 deliberate steps to run it.

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