businessfish

businessfish, 11 days ago

it’s important to mention wherever that incorrect point is brought up:

the only reason people say there are no viruses on linux (which is wrong from the get go) is because there just isn’t enough market share for lots of malware to be written and distributed with a linux target in mind. it is out there and it is a risk, just much rarer than windows malware. if more people start using linux, user-targeted linux malware in the wild will likely become just as common (and effective) as the stuff targeting windows.

never assume your system is safe by default and requires no hardening or awareness from the user/org.

businessfish, 5 days ago

while you are correct that linux systems are targeted by bad actors all the time, the distinction that i am making here is that a vast majority of the time malware is targeted towards organizations and their linux servers, which could be both unapplicable and unseen to a home linux user. not much of that hacker effort is going into distributing malware that would find and infect a personal linux user like myself through, for example, a compromised public web page. instead, most of that user-targeted malware is made to infect windows users simply because they outnumber linux users by a large amount.

i guess what i mean to say is that there is plenty of malware for every type of popular system as well as people and organizations to exploit it, but due to the effects of having a small user market share, home linux users can develop this misinformed notion that traditional malware you might get from a web download or malicious email does not exist for linux.