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)
https://linuxsecurity.com/features/ringreaper-linux-malware
Thank you!
I add this overview article https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/ethical-hacking/what-is-linux-malware/
I don’t think OP’s dad will host a misconfigured cloud service on their computer or set an insecure password, enable ssh and then also open a port in the router. Most attacks on that list are specific to how internet servers are set up. And well, insecure old embedded devices. And we in fact have those systems targeted regularly. My servers gets bombarded with malicious traffic trying to get in.
Yes. That is part of the insight. But the auto upgrade is a good practice for Desktop PCs, too. And the article shows, that there are vectors and counter measures. Root kits are known for ages.
Sure. We get security vulnerabilities in Chrome and Firefox all the time. Sometimes the libraries handling images are vulnerable and that’s a big issue. And zero-days are a small fraction of actual attacks, most likely you’re getting hacked because of old, vulnerable software. So updates are the first priority. And backups is something people also frequently forget to set up.
Good point. To get back to the original question, I wouldn’t change the distro unless they are known to be slow with security updates. Anything debian and ubuntu based should work just fine.