[Haifux] Is the risk real? (Was: New mail icon for Thunderbird over Gnome)

[guy keren]

at least in the past - the risk was real.

when i first connected my computer to the internet via ADSL, and set up 
firewall rules - i was surprised to see that i get many (hundreads) of 
failed network connections from around the world.

what people do, is run software that scans complete address (IP) ranges, 
and attempt to find exploitable services on them.

the solution, on my part, was to close down everything i could at the 
firewall level, and try to keep the open services (e.g. the kernel 
itself, ssh server, etc) updated. keeping things updated was annoying 
with redhat - specifically the distribution updates - and is one of the 
reasons i switched to ubuntu. i tend to keep to the LTS (long term 
support - 3 years) versions of ubuntu - and try to be in long delay 
after the latest distributions - after having the diss-pleasure of 
upgrading too early to 8.04 (or something).

--guy

On 05/14/2012 12:45 AM, Eli Billauer wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Since my not-so-updated software versions became an issue in itself
> (somehow I always get that) I wondered: Leave alone the unpleasant
> feeling of knowing your computer *could* be exploited, are there any
> real cases of attacks against personal, non-server Linux machines? The
> need to protect a server or a shared machine is obvious. But when it
> comes to a personal computer, is there any real life justification to be
> anything else than completely indifferent to those risks? Or can we in
> fact take a kibbutz approach of leaving the door open, knowing that we
> may invite someone to break in, but that doesn't really happen?
>
> This is not a question about what can happen, but what really does.
>
> And just to wrap up the original subject: I was reluctant to try
> mail-notification, because my mail filters move around the mails as they
> arrive. So I suspected things would get messy using a tool that
> apparently polls the mail box files directly.
>
> Anyhow, my solution ended up to be the Gnome Integration add on. I also
> installed Mail Tweak, which among others allowed me to set HTML + Plain
> text as the default outgoing mail format.
>
>     Eli
>
>
> On 05/13/2012 08:40 PM, Oron Peled wrote:
>> On Sunday, 13 בMay 2012 19:22:20 Eli Billauer wrote:
>>
>>> Hello all,
>>> I've finally started working with Thunderbird under Linux (FC12, with
>>>
>> Thunderbird 3.0.7). The old settings were migrated perfectly,
>>
>> If your "new" one is 3.0.7, I am afraid to ask what was the old ;-)
>>
>> $ rpm -q thunderbird
>> thunderbird-11.0.1-1.fc15.i686
>>
>> As you can see I use a pretty old Fedora (F15, plan to upgrade directly
>> to F17, before F15 is EOL). Still, using a network-facing application
>> which did not get any security updates for several years, is...
>> (ok, let's call it brave, not to be offensive...)
>>
>>
>>> and all is working fine. Well, there's a thing I miss.
>>> In Windows, there used to be an icon when new mail has arrived. This icon
>>>
>> doesn't show up on Linux.
>>
>> Obviously in Linux its a separate application (which is hopefully slimmer,
>> since it runs all the time).
>>
>> IIRC, Gnome used to have a nice applet called "mail-notification":
>>    http://www.nongnu.org/mailnotify
>> This supported multiple accounts/mailboxes/protocols, etc.
>>
>> I believe you can find it pre-packaged even for your pre-historic Fedora.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Web:http://www.billauer.co.il
>
>
>
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