[GreenKeys] OT - Highly stealthy Linux trojan may have infected victims for years...

[Chris Elmquist]

On Tuesday (12/09/2014 at 09:04PM -0600), Virgil Bierschwale wrote:
> Being a former IT type, I get a kick out of this.
> All of the proponents of Linux have said for decades, we don't have this
> problem.
> 
> Yet, it appears that we do.

<Geez, someone hold my beer again and watch this>

But we will have this problem for about 16 hours.  Not 16 years.

In the serious world, where certain agencies try to protect the
security of this country by running very, very large, highly scalable
supercomputers, not a one of those runs anything other than Linux
these days.

Of the Top 500 fastest computers in the world, 485 run Linux, one runs
Windows.

http://www.top500.org/statistics/list/

Operating system Family         Count   System Share (%)        Rmax (GFlops)   Rpeak (GFlops)  Cores 
Linux   485     97      303,377,333     446,928,067     22,851,693
Unix    13      2.6     5,101,679       6,118,142       196,224
Mixed   1       0.2     190,900 222,822 65,536
Windows 1       0.2     180,600 233,472 30,720

In 2009, there were four systems running Windows, then in 2011, there
were three and now there is one.

All of the recent security breaches at places like Target, Home Depot, and
others have occurred in Microsoft shops, where the server infrastructure
and the embedded systems are Microsoft operating systems and Microsoft
web services.

http://www.dailytech.com/Appalling+Negligence+DecadeOld+Windows+XPe+Holes+Led+to+Home+Depot+Hack/article36517.htm

Contrary to popular belief, Microsoft platforms are not targeted because
they are so popular, they are targeted because they are so easy.

Amazon, Google, eBay, Facebook, Twitter, NetFlix and most of the
more popular, very large Internet properties all run on Linux server
infrastructure.

As a former CDC, ETA, Unlimited Scale, SGI and Cray engineer, I know a
thing or two about this particular world.

Chris N0JCF
-- 
Chris Elmquist