A few months after the Ramen Worm passed around, I had a spare MkLinux server, so I decided to put the machine up on my cable modem with the insecure wu-ftpd running and see how long it took to get 0wned. It took about 18 hours. MkLinux was extremely secure and not vulnerable to the Ramen Worm until I deliberately opened it up. I took out all the other usual linux guts so there was not much you could do once you got root. The PPC distro was foreign enough that whoever owned me couldn't do much but reboot me a few times. They quickly became bored with the slow speed of my PPC 8100/110 and gave up. Ha.
The surest prevention for crime is to have nothing worth stealing.
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