Comment by Barrin92
6 hours ago
>More so than, say, Windows? Really?
significantly so. Windows has a coherent story when it comes to permissions and access. Differentiated out access controls, least privilege, UAC, mandatory integrity control and all configured out of the box.
Without AppArmor or SElinux correctly configured, which it isn't on most desktop distributions in the linux world most of your apps can still read anything, there's little sandboxing. The NT Kernel was designed with an object model in mind so you always had the abilities to have rich descriptions and policies for whatever you're handling where all of that is bolted on unix systems after the fact.
>Windows has a coherent story when it comes to permissions and access.
Yet that doesn't seem to matter much for stealer malware.
it does matter, things like the Data Protection API do meaningfully reduce what you can extract from a windows system.
Of course Windows regardless has taken the brunt of the attacks because it ran virtually every desktop machine in the world so people go after users anyway. Desktop Linux systems where never economically interesting for malware. But now that they have gained a modicum of traction they're going to get the exact same treatment, hence this thread.
Microsoft doesn't advertise it much but they do have the advantage of controlling their build environments, software is signed etc. A system like the AUR where you pull in unsigned packages from anonymous people with so many arch users relying on it is not going to be easy to address. It lived on security through obscurity.