Hi Piers and Colin,

On 19/12/19 9:49 am, Colin Fee via luv-beginners wrote:


On Thu, 19 Dec 2019 at 02:01, Peter Wolf via luv-beginners <luv-beginners@luv.asn.au> wrote:
Hello,

             I'm still having major problems with computer security of
Linux Mint 19 MATE.I believe that with default settings ,this version of
linux is unusable as it gets hacked in a few minutes by bots,mainly via
firefox.

Hi Peter,

Like Piers, your post has piqued my interest. What's your evidence that a default installation of Linux Mint is inherently unsecured? 

Based on your assertion I did some rudimentary searching this morning and could not find any evidence to suggest that an out-of-the-box installation of Linux Mint is any less secure than it's progenitors Ubuntu and Debian, notwithstanding any changes that the distro admins at Mint have made that could potentially weaken it.  Obviously I making the assumption that such an installation accepted default/suggested options during the install process.

I can't comment on Firefox as on the whole I don't use it, but would have thought that a recent/up to date version of FF would be relatively secure unless deliberately weekend by user action.

So as Piers alludes to, what else is going on?

What evidence do you have that you've been hacked?

--
Colin Fee
tfeccles@gmail.com







On 19/12/19 9:18 am, Piers Rowan via luv-beginners wrote:


On 19/12/19 1:01 am, Peter Wolf via luv-beginners wrote:
 residential computers (which are probably mostly hacked and used as bots to hack other computers) and rented servers.


Hi Peter,

I've never used mint but your post draws me to this comment. Are you saying that there are computers on your home/work network that you suspect are hacked?

Very likely they are and have been.I have strong evidence of this such as the following -

- computer slow during startup,shutdown and general operation compared to just after a fresh install

,I can tell because the fastest computer I normally use is a dual core and have found these run quicker than hacked

quad and 6 core computers for many /most applications when dual core not hacked.

- After visiting dodgy websites that create dozens of connections to residential computers with Firefox,

software updates no longer work and a change of password stops linux Mint from starting up at all.

A check shows almost every file has had its permissions changed.

 - When apparently hacked ,some of my data (such as old important looking photos) has mysteriously gone missing.

- Firefox stops working with many websites when apparently hacked and slows down dramatically.

- excessive hard drive activity after I visit some websites,like a search is going on.


- Once I found the "find" command running on one of my computers using the command  htop.It was taking a large chunk of CPU usage.I never started the "find"  command and it was running constantly.



Although I presume it could be connected to a router problem or perhaps even bugs in the Linux Mint software.



If so then cleaning these first would also be wise.

I find it very strange that in a typical environment that hackers/bots manage to jump your router's firewall so successfully that they propagate to you so quickly. Perhaps the router is compromised and that is the source of the hacks?

FF should be OK - are there plugins that you use that may contribute to it? If you use a different browser do you have the same issue? 

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