With the recent windows 10 EoL news, I was able to move my dad over to Linux mint. But he does a lot of finance stuff. Long ago, Linux had a belief that desktop Linux are not the primary target for crackers but I don’t believe that true anymore since it’s getting significantly popular lately like Europe government migration over to Linux and Libreoffice.

My question would be , given my dad is just as careful on Linux as he has been on windows, would it be fine to do finance like banking and trading (not the fastest kind )?

If not, what would be your distro of choice for that? Even browsers (I installed Firefox and Edge from Microsoft website deb file)

  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.de
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    3 days ago

    Can I get some list or a reference to educate myself? As far as I know it still holds true. There’s rootkits, a lot of old stuff and exploits of webservers or embedded devices, supply chain attacks towards developers and the one day the Mint ISO file got compromised. But I’m completely unaware of desktop computer malware with high risk or actually spreading?! And the list on Wikipedia seems to confirm what i said…

    • rhabarba@feddit.org
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      3 days ago

      Okay, let’s assume for fun that there’s highly developed Linux malware that exclusively infects servers and leaves desktops alone. What exactly is a server? Is it a server as soon as a web server service is running? A DNS service? An SMTP service? Some of these are also included with Linux desktops.

      But that’s not the point. There’s no specific “Linux server malware”. There’s Linux malware. It targets the Linux kernel (current data point), not any web stuff.

      • hendrik@palaver.p3x.de
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        3 days ago

        For example it’s something that has an Apache webserver installed and that Apache is accessible from outside… So the Apache exploit can do something. Do you have both conditions met on your laptop/desktop computer? I’m pretty sure that won’t be the case, and that’s the difference here. And yes, that’s specific.

        • rhabarba@feddit.org
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          3 days ago

          Let me repeat my last paragraph, as you seem to have stopped reading after the first question mark:

          But that’s not the point. There’s no specific “Linux server malware”. There’s Linux malware.