Never Hacked or Infected--Yet (Was: Re: End of life for FC12?)

[Andras Simon]

On 11/11/10, Patrick Bartek <bartek047 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- On Wed, 11/10/10, Andras Simon <szajmi at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> >> [snip]
>> >> How do you know you haven't been infected or
>> hacked?
>> >> (I don't doubt that you do, just curious about
>> how.)
>> >
>> > Lack of the usual indicators, that is, no odd
>> application behavior,  no
>> > unusual slow-downs, no excessive CPU usage, no
>> excessive or abnormal net (or
>> > hard drive) activity, no crashes or freezes, no
>> strange log reports, no
>> > reports from friends about receiving spam e-mails from
>> me that I never sent,
>> > etc.
>> >
>> > I've spent enough time fixing friends' infected
>> Windows machines that I've
>> > gotten a "feel" for when something is amiss.
>> It's not a definitive feeling,
>> > just an indicator to start checking for something
>> wrong.
>> >
>>
>> I hope that you're not deluding yourself...
>
> Why would you think I am?

I'm no expert on intrusion detection, but I'm pretty sure that it
involves much more than gut feelings. A clever cracker will make sure
that you don't experience "the usual indicators".

Anyway, even if you use eol'd Fedoras (and I must admit, I do, too),
you should probably not let sensitive data (credit card numbers and
such) anywhere near it.

Andras