April 27th, 2020 at 10:05 PM
Yeah Linux is only 'secure' because very little people use it, so people who write viruses don't want to waste their time possibly infecting 1% of people when they can write a virus for Windows and possibly infect 50% of people.
Also, Linux is much more, uh, 'modular' for lack of a better word. The virus might try to steal saved passwords from Firefox files, but you might have installed Firefox to a different location, or even a different partition on the disk, and set up $PATH to point to a different install location to keep your ease-of-use. But the virus will only be searching for the right files in certain parts of the computer, most likely using utilities like 'find', 'which', or even 'grep' so if you configured those utilities differently, you'd also have different results which the virus might not recognize.
Or you might not have Firefox installed (as /bin/firefox ) but you might have the ESR build installed instead (/bin/firefox-esr ) and /bin/firefox might be a simlink to the binary instead, so again, an extra hurdle that the virus needs to deal with.
But with Windows, most people install to default locations because it's easy. Even if they don't, programs typically use default appdata directories to store their data like cookies, saved passwords, profiles, cache, etc. and as a result, just parse those directories and you'll find what you're looking for 99% of the time.
But there's definitely lots of malware for Linux, and just like any other operating system, if you don't know what you're doing, you're probably going to get infected.
Also, Linux is much more, uh, 'modular' for lack of a better word. The virus might try to steal saved passwords from Firefox files, but you might have installed Firefox to a different location, or even a different partition on the disk, and set up $PATH to point to a different install location to keep your ease-of-use. But the virus will only be searching for the right files in certain parts of the computer, most likely using utilities like 'find', 'which', or even 'grep' so if you configured those utilities differently, you'd also have different results which the virus might not recognize.
Or you might not have Firefox installed (as /bin/firefox ) but you might have the ESR build installed instead (/bin/firefox-esr ) and /bin/firefox might be a simlink to the binary instead, so again, an extra hurdle that the virus needs to deal with.
But with Windows, most people install to default locations because it's easy. Even if they don't, programs typically use default appdata directories to store their data like cookies, saved passwords, profiles, cache, etc. and as a result, just parse those directories and you'll find what you're looking for 99% of the time.
But there's definitely lots of malware for Linux, and just like any other operating system, if you don't know what you're doing, you're probably going to get infected.
