4 Minutes And Counting
By Ian Scott
An interesting report from TechWeb, regarding a test by AvanteGarde, a marketing-communications firm. Seems AvanteGarde wanted to test the security of “out of the box” operating systems to see how soon they would be compromised. Included in the test were machines “equipped with Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003, Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 1 (SP1), Microsoft Windows XP SP1 with the free ZoneAlarm personal firewall, Microsoft Windows XP SP2, Macintosh OS X 10.3.5, and Linspire’s distribution of Linux.”
With Windows XP SPI, it had been cracked within 30 seconds! The average overall was 4 minutes. That’s less time for many people to connect and download patches.
According to the article, “The most secure system during the experiment was the one running Linspire’s Linux. Out of the box, Linspire left only one open port. While it reacted to ping requests by automated attackers sniffing for victims, it experienced the fewest attacks of any of the six machines and was never compromised, since there were no exposed ports (and thus services) to exploit.”
I’m not surprised. Although I’ve never used Linspire’s distribution, I do know that Redhat and Fedora versions of Linux allow you to set the security levels, and on high, you’re relatively secure.
Of course, as the article points out, no machine is vulnerable. Computer security is a process and one must be ever vigilant, patching, updating, and using widely available tools to test their own systems on a regular basis.
Yeah, it can be a pain in the neck. But so can checking your oil and all the other fluids in your car – especially if you live where winter strikes hard and cold, like where I’m located. But you still have to do it!
If your data is really important to you, in some ways, it’s more important to ensure your systems are as secure as possible than it is to check the oil level in your car. Cars can be replaced. Data is difficult, especially if you haven’t backed up!
Check out TechWeb’s article here.
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