But then again, those were the type of users
whose PCs were usually infested with viruses and spyware. Don't let the same thing happen to
431
Running Linspire and Freespire 15
your Linux system; create a user account and use root only when absolutely necessary. The
Freespire installer is good in this regard, because it forces you to create a user account.
For the times when you do have to do work as root, it can be a pain to log out and log back in or
to open a separate terminal window, so Linspire and Freespire include the sudo command. This
allows you to run a single command as root and then immediately revert to your account??™s normal
level of privilege. The default setup is that users in the admins group have the ability to use sudo.
The accounts that you create during the installation process are automatically added to admins,
and you can add or remove other user accounts to it later. Here, too, you can take steps to increase
the default level of security. The problem is that the configuration file for sudo, /etc/sudoers,
contains a line like this:
%admins ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL
This means that any user in the admins group can run sudo without having to type in his password,
which is quite convenient but allows any malicious hacker who can exploit an admins
account full access to the system.
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