How-To Geek Forums / Linux
How Do you protect Your Ubuntu System?
(4 posts)
The only things you need concern yourself about are rootkits. You can install chkrootkit and rkhunter to scan for rootkits. The other danger is social engineering or getting tricked into giving your personal info or root access to your system. Other than these two things you need not worry as malware will not run on a linux file system currently because they are all written for NTFS or windows.
You want to really feel naked? You will not experience defragmentation on a linux file system. No need to waste hours letting your hard disk defrag.
For your reading:
I suppose there are viruses and malware for linux, but as noted above, it's probably a very small risk. I've run Ubuntu for probably 5 years and never had a problem. I will say to become knowledgeable about open ports though. Ubuntu comes with a firewall and all incoming ports closed, but there are tools to open them as needed. The first will probably be 22 for SSH (Secure Shell) which you'll use to network into from an outside machine. For myself, I make it a little harder and reassign the listening port to something other than 22, like 12345, as I've had hackers try automated scripts to guess my user name and password on 22. And of course, use decent passwords.
