Friday, June 09, 2006

From the tin-foil hat brigade

Found this gem on a tech mailing list:

Can Microsoft or any one else burrow through a Linux internet connection and plant a bomb to destroy Windows programs on a single SATA hard drive with 3 partitions? Linux is a primary partition, XP also a primary and a data partition is the only access to Internet. -- Rupreckt

(Name has been changed to protect the guilty.)

Short answer: yes, but wearing a tin-foil hat has been found to close that security hole.

Serious answer: if your Linux system is configured to give random people coming in from the Internet full write-permission to your hard disk, then yes, anyone can do anything they like to everything on your hard disk. Linux security is not security at all if you turn it off.

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