High-profile headlines involving the gerund ‘hacking’ are becoming increasingly common. Nary a day goes by without cybercrooks making off with millions of dollars worth of internet money (or “priceless” NFTs). Which is a shame because lots of the people defending against all this computer misuse would probably describe themselves as hackers, too. We’ll continue this debate within, but the point is ransomware, denial of service attacks and even state-sponsored cyber operations are all on the rise.
In days gone by Linux users might have had reason to be aloof. In the early 90s when Linux was still young, there probably weren’t that many people trying to attack it. And that’s largely because there weren’t all that many people using it. Within a couple of years though, that had all changed. Red Hat and openSUSE enshrined Linux’s place in the server market. Now it’s all over the cloud, on two billion phones, while some quirky individuals use it as a desktop operating system.
The computing ecosystem has become complex. So complex, in fact, that beyond the usual guidance – “don’t click suspect links”, “beware of email attachments” and “keep your software up to date” – there isn’t much tangible advice we can impart to regular users.