Remember guys, it took about a decade for Solar Winds to discover somebody had root access to everybody that used their software, another decade for somebody outside Solar Winds to discover it and tell everybody, and half a decade with nobody claiming to have solved the issue up to now.

So when you believe that your computer with an EDS is safe just because you can’t use it, think again.

Also: don’t trust your employees to boot into safe mode. Trust a 3rd party to freely install system level files at any time.

Exactly. This is exactly the problem, and unless people wisen up the software security problem is only going to get worse. Companies and Governments need to rethink how they approach security entirely. This is a preview of what is to come, its only going to get worse and more damaging from here, and none of the vendors care.

Few things, in rough order:

• Smaller = less attack surface. You can strip a Linux OS down to only what is needed.

• Open source, so it’s can be peered review. There are Unix distros like OpenBSD, that share lot of user space component options, where auditing is a big thing. The whole sunlight and oxygen stops things festering as much. As abosed to things locked in a box in another box down in a cellar.

• Open source transparency forces corporates to be better. We can see what they are and aren’t doing.

• Diversity. The is no “Linux”, it’s a ecosystem of Linux distros all built and configured differently, using different components. Think of Linux as just a type of base board in a sea of Unix Lego bits. There are plenty of big deployments on BSD bases that share a lot with some Linux deployments.

• Unix security is simplier than Windows security, so easer to not mess up.

In general it is. Opensource software has less bugs that proprietary. And even those bugs can be mitigated with hardening.

Sort of an aside, but I am seeing Microsoft more as a hostile entity that I need to protect myself from.

In addition to what others have said, there’s the move towards containerized applications on Linux via flatpaks, immutable distributions, and snapshots/rollbacks. There are also distributions like Debian with a delayed package release schedule for added stability and security. Its my understanding that you could have an exceptionally secure, effectively trustless, Linux system beyond what is possible on Mac or Windows.

If you follow the philosophy that it follows, that is, giving the least possible permission to any application, to make it work, it easily becomes much more secure than Windows.

On the other hand, if you log into your GUI desktop as root, Bill Gates save you.

Defending Windows in a linux memes community.

That’s a bold move cotton, let’s see how that works out for 'em