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Re: [LUG] Linux - and security

 

On Tue, Nov 6, 2012 at 12:49 PM, Simon Robert -Cottage wrote:
> Yup facebook, google and amazon are logged in always, so I suppose our
> burglar could order stuff from amazon (needs a delivery address)

...which they can find easily using money mules.

> If someone parks in the drive, sniffs my FTP credentials and somehow manages
> to set up a botnet with the hosting company, well it's the hosting companies
> problem not mine.

While this may be true in the legal sense (actually, I'm not sure
about this at all), if someone uses your site to serve bad stuff, your
site could be blocked by security software, including anti-phishing
tools built inside browsers these days. Your host could also decide to
take down your site altogether, at least temporarily. In effect this
could mean that few resp. no people could visit your website.

If the stuff they upload is _really_ bad, the police may want to have
a word with you, and they may want to have that word at their place
rather than yours.

> Your concerns about internet security are valid and true, but my data is
> worthless

Security is not just about protecting your data against theft: at
least 99% of the files on my PC are completely worthless to others and
the chances of someone abusing it are small. (Not zero though: if
someone had access to your PC, they'd probably find a lot of personal
information there. This could be used in identity theft.) Security is
also also about making sure your computers aren't being used to do
harm to the wider Internet.

> it is also true that
> most attacks are via compromised websites.

This is a good point of course, but it makes:

> And yes if I was doing security for a company I would make people sign
> something saying they would not visit fake torrents sites, in fact give them
> a limited number of URLs possible.

a bit pointless as a piece of advice. :-)

> OK, enouf. I'm just off to complete a really great deal with the daughter of
> a Nigerian millionaire....

:-)

Martijn.

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