i just switched to it from windows 11 and im pretty used to using windows defender,so not having one here feels weird. i pirate a lot from fmhy.net with brave browser adblocker.
is there anything i should do?
Mostly avoid downloading and running packages from sources you don’t trust. And if you’re going to run something you don’t fully trust, try to run it sandboxed (like firejail or a vm, for example). Linux is generally safer than Windows because a lot of malware are created to exploit Windows weakness… also, if you use Flatpak (sepecially verified ones) or your distro package manager, you will hardly get infected.
Did ubuntu fix the issue where if a package with the same name exists in both the actual repository and in the snap store, it will silently install the one from the snap store?
I remember an attack where someone uploaded a package to the snap store with the same name as a different repo package, and people were downloading the “malicious” (it wasn’t actually malicious, just a proof of the attack vector) package instead.
If they haven’t fixed that yet, then yeah can’t trust the package manager either, on ubuntu specifically.
Last time I checked (which was somewhere within the last 3 years) not only will the snap version get installed but if you force a non-snap version of the software and do an update it will replace the non-snap version with the snap version. It’s the kind of idiotic shit I’d expect from Microsoft.
I don’t know if Ubuntu has fixed it, because trying to enforce their Snap store was intentional. But I can’t say for sure because there have been years that I don’t use it.
But yeah, for anyone using it, I’d recommend to just remove Snap entirely, since it’s totally unnecessary and goes against pretty much every Linux core concept.
Or just use something like Kubuntu or Linux Mint, that have Ubuntu under hood but are more community driven instead of relying on Canonical.
If running a windows game through wine, there are some risks if the game contains a virus.
The biggest risk is that wine typically makes your Linux user files available by having them mounted as the z: drive. If you run an exe that’s actually ransomware, it can possibly encrypt some of your userfiles if permissions allow. This isn’t an issue if you run the games through steam, because it runs windows programs in containers.
There’s also a risk of keyloggers, but they should only work for things running inside the same wine session.
You can run wine in bottles flatpak sandbox
Disable snaps?
Big difference between Linux and Windows: Linux permissions are per-process, while Windows permissions are per-user. This is why Windows needs Defender in the first place (in addition to being the big target).
If you’re not using root all the time, risks are very low.
an adversary could just get the root password with a keylogger.
On wayland you have keyloggers?
You do not need admin privs to log keystrokes on xorg. I am 99% sure this is true in wayland too.
“Security through obscurity” is not real security.
We’ve just had a string of very public privesc exploits, and there are plenty of non public ones as well, so running as non-root doesn’t necessarily mean much.
Sudo CD /ironycanal/Home/Documents
Sudo kwrite passwords.txt
It’s not needed, i contributed to fmhy.net, all if not all most websites on there are vetted and safe
