* It's less hassle if it doesn't ask, just doesn't do it. * The answer should almost always be "no". I call those "Should I do something stupid" dialogs.
KDE opens a dialog and asks you if you want the CD to be mounted and people CAN learn not to be social-engineered. you pretty much have to depend on social engineering. It's harder to penetrate OS X in the first place. That's the biggest security problem Windows has. The biggest advantage that Apple has is that Safari doesn't (any more) have a mechanism (at least not by default) to blithely execute outside a *closed* sandbox (not a leaky one) any random malware that can convince it that it's safe and trusted. And malware can similarly break out of Vista's jail around IE, and whatever APple does along those lines. You can protect the OS from the malware, but the malware can still hide, still restart itself after a reboot, and still destroy everything you actually CARE about without root access. THe thing is, it's not true that "one of the main security aspects of OS X is that root access is held sacred (as it should be) and malware is assumed to be 'stopped at the gate' by that policy". It's a classic blunder, like getting into a land war in Asia, and is similar to the in NT3.51's scheduler to get LOCALSYSTEM rights, or the one in /bin/write in 2BSD to get a root shell.Īnd I am about 99 44/100 percent sure that there's more undiscovered holes like this in OS X, Windows Vista, and any random Linux desktop you could name. Physical-access only just means there's less to worry about.įirst, yes, this is a serious bug. That said, an exploit is an exploit, and it should be treated as such. A physical keylogger between the keyboard and computer could be installed to discover typed passwords, etc. Even with encryption, more security measures still need to be taken at the physical level. And when we see encryption exploits, we do get hyped up about it. The only way to have any security at the physical level is with encryption. Got a Linux machine? I can reboot and use grub to boot into single-user mode.
From there I can plant trojans, read your files, do whatever. Got a machine with literally any operating system? All I need is to reboot the computer with a linux live cd (or usb thumb drive) and I get read / write access to everywhere. The reason that requiring physical access is seen as no big deal is because all that stuff you're worried about is something I can do without the need of any exploits. My even better question is: why is "bah, it requires physical access" seen as an automatic "don't worry about it" around these parts?.Workstations at work have lots of people who can log into them.Plus there are a lot of people who can physically get near any computer, up to CEO level.
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