“It’s not just a matter of user-friendliness. Security
matters too–especially the kind of security that safeguards new
users.“
“My friendly local network administrator walked in just as I was
finishing up my Red Hat 6.0 installation, the day after the
software’s release. He’s a UNIX guy, and I thought he’d be pleased
to see users like me making the switch from Windows to Linux. But
the look on his face told me otherwise–shock, horror, dread. “Do
you know how to configure Linux so that it’s secure on a LAN? Which
daemons are you running? Are you running sendmail? Do you know how
to configure it? Do you have the latest version of bind?
Aarggh!”
“A couple of weeks later, I found out why he was so worried.
Working at home, and sheltered (or so I thought) by a dynamically
assigned IP address, I suddenly realized I wasn’t the only person
using my computer. I lunged for the power switch, and shut down my
system just in time. I thought I had secured my system fairly well,
but–as I later discovered–I wasn’t running the latest and
greatest version of a certain well-known daemon. Admittedly, it was
one I probably shouldn’t have been running at all. The result? When
the script kiddies came calling, they found my front door wide
open.”