Support for Linux in the traditionally conservative world of financial services has more than doubled in the last year according to the latest market intelligence.
Support for open source technologies from mainstream suppliers such as IBM and Sun has boosted the number of financial institutions using Linux from 27 percent last year to 58 percent in 2005, according to a report from financial technology researchers Finextra.
Attackers are no longer bothering to attack average Linux systems, apparently because there's so much more money to be made from invading Windows, according to security researchers.
The Honeynet Project, which sets up Linux networks in order to observe attack activity, found that the life expectancy of such systems has dramatically increased from two years ago. Its 2004 findings, published recently, found that an unpatched Linux system lasts, on average, three months before it is compromised. That's compared with about 72 hours for 2001-02.
Linux systems are getting tougher for hackers to crack, security experts have reported today.
A study by not-for-profit IT security testing organisation Honeynet Project has shown that, on average, Linux systems today take three months to fall prey to hackers, up from 72 hours in equivalent tests conducted between 2001 and 2002.
The 2004 results came after a team of researchers set up 19 Linux and four Solaris 'honeypots' in eight countries including the UK. Honeypots are unpatched internet-connected computers designed to be targets for hackers.
LINUX SUPPLIERS Red Hat, Novell SuSE and Mandrakesoft have clubbed together to issue security patches against flaws in their Linux operating systems.
Red Hat has this week issued three patches, while Mandrakesoft has issued two patches, and Novell SuSE one, in response to various security threats to their operating systems.
According security outfit Secunia, these include openings for denial-of-service attacks, buffer overflow attacks, and the use of graphics and Adobe Acrobat documents to take over a user’s machine.
SOFTWARE FIRM Novell said it is making SuSE Linux Professional 9.2 available as a free download.
Novell said the version differs from the LiveDVD version, is a fully installable version, and is not time limited.
The download is available from ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/
Linux creator Linus Torvalds had a few things to say this week about the way potential security issues are disclosed to fellow open sourcers. And it wasn't all good.
His comments came as part of a mailing list discussion among kernel developers about creating a security contact point for people to use when potential kernel security issues arise.
This HOWTO is intended for a technical audience, Linux system administrators and security people in corporations and organizations that have to use commercial Linux distributions in production. The primary focus of this Linux Security guide is to discuss basic security requirements that should be met by all audited Linux production servers at a minimum. This document covers system services like SSH which are usually needed and running on most Linux production servers. But this article does not cover Apache, Samba etc. since these services are usually not needed on all systems.
Novell last week said it will soon detail plans to include server virtualization technology in its SUSE Linux operating system. Red Hat intends to do the same thing with its Linux distribution, and a leading contender for both vendors may be an open-source virtualization technology called Xen. Both Red Hat and Novell said they're also looking at a number of other virtualization technologies. Novell, for instance, is eyeing Acton, Mass.-based start-up Katana Technology's promised virtualization software, which is expected to run on Linux machines.
Jake Moilanen provided a series of four patches against the 2.6.9 Linux kernel that introduce a simple genetic algorithm used for automatic tuning. The patches update the anticipatory IO scheduler and the zaphod CPU scheduler to both use the new in-kernel library, theoretically allowing them to automatically tune themselves for the best possible performance for any given workload. Jake says, "using these patches, there are small gains (1-3%) in Unixbench & SpecJBB. I am hoping a scheduler guru will able to rework them to give higher gains."
Late yesterday is was announced to the Full Disclosure mailing list that 6 vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel have been discovered both in the older 2.4 kernel branch and the new 2.6 kernel branch. The vulnerabilities range from Local privilege escalation to Denial of Service attacks against vulnerable releases of the kernel.
