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posted by on Wednesday January 11 2017, @11:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the tux-was-asking-for-it dept.

In case you penguin botherers were feeling left out, the folks over at iTWire bring us this little fun bit o' news:

Eset says it has found a Linux variant of the KillDisk malware used in the late 2015 attack on the Ukraine electricity system.

Like its Windows counterpart, the Linux version of KillDisk encrypts files, rendering the affected system unbootable. It asks for the same 222 Bitcoin (around US$278,000) ransom, but the encryption key used is neither stored locally or sent to a remote server, so even if the perpetrators are paid they have no way of reversing the process.

Eset says its researchers have found a weakness in the encryption method that makes decryption "possible, albeit difficult." Exactly how decryption can be performed was not disclosed.

It's nice to feel noticed but I could personally do without this particular kind of attention.


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Marand on Friday January 13 2017, @12:45PM

    by Marand (1081) on Friday January 13 2017, @12:45PM (#453264) Journal

    For the record, the AC's right: getty only uses the one it's started on, same as X. You're confusing distros choosing to start six copies of getty (as seen in /etc/inittab) on six ttys with some perceived innate property of getty that doesn't exist. If you want to, you can lower the number of spawned getty instances (useful on massively resource-limited systems), add more spawned instances of X on 8/9, or combine the two and only spawn one getty and make 2-9 be X servers. (No idea why you'd want to, though, unless you're setting up some kind of weird multi-user system where you'll have 5 people using the same system simultaneously.)

    "User switching" features in DEs are doing the same thing, more or less, just dynamically. When you choose to do a user-switch, a new X server is fired up on another tty (usually 8 and up, since distros typically start the first X on 7), the current one activates whatever screen locking it does, and it switches over to the new tty. You can swap between them using the same alt-F[x] (or ctrl-alt-F[x] from inside X) hotkeys you use to swap ttys.

    Switching X servers like that is overkill outside of actual multi-user systems, though; for basic separation of concerns-style account use, there are other ways that I covered in my other comment.

    As for problems with term switching Dr Spin mentioned, that's most likely GPU related. For example, using an nvidia GPU with the (much faster, and generally good) proprietary driver has long been a source of frustration with regard to terminal switching, especially once it became popular to do hacky shit to make the text consoles fancier. Nvidia's drivers have never gotten along well with that, and the workaround has generally been to force the kernel to give you boring old 80x25 (or whatever) text ttys if you have problems switching. Though YMMV there; it's gotten better the past few years, and I'm currently using an nvidia GPU with the proprietary driver without tty-switching problems.

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