[Nottingham] Safer by design or just overlooked? (Was: Gameover Zeus (GOZ) and Cryptolocker malware rackets)

[Andy Smith]

Hello,

On Tue, Jun 10, 2014 at 12:25:14PM +0100, Martin wrote:
> On 10/06/14 08:50, Jason Irwin wrote:
> > Also, is there anything inherent to the GNU/Linux security set-up that
> > would prevent such crypto-crap?
> 
> The *nix-style permissions structure?

CryptoLocker works by walking through the user's documents on
accessible drives. On Linux, all your important (user-contributed)
documents are about as likely to be writeable by your user as on
Windows I suspect.

Note also that CryptoLocker will look in mapped network drives, so
if you have a Samba mount on a Windows desktop from a Linux server
then your documents could still end up being encrypted by it.

The best defence against CryptoLocker is probably backups that
aren't mounted locally.

Cheers,
Andy

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