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Generally no, for many reasons. I think the most important one here is that in a Windows server there’s a lot of software bundled together (AD services, the SMB server, IIS, RPC stuff like this netlogon interface, WMI, RDP, many others) that you can generally expect to find on any Windows server, giving you a wealth of targets and potential ways to exploit how different components interact. A base Linux system has relatively few services (just SSH in simple distributions) so to begin targeting Linux the same way you’d have to decide to go after RHEL or something, narrowing an already tiny share of servers down even further. Other reasons include the dominance of Windows outside the tech industry (which makes it a more interesting and lucrative target for vulnerability researchers and exploit developers), lack of comparable functionality to AD for Linux servers, and probably higher standards for code quality and cryptography in highly scrutinized open source applications like MIT Kerberos.



A base Linux system has relatively few services (just SSH in simple distributions) so to begin targeting Linux the same way you’d have to decide to go after RHEL or something

Not sure why it shuold be REHL, there are linux counterparts for most bundled software you mention so a comparison against a base linux system + e.g. samba/vnc/nginx/... still seems fair. All of those have had (sometimes severe i.e. root escalation) vulnerabilities in the past, but answering the question whether it's 'as frequent' is pretty hard to answer. I would also guess towards 'no' though.


Yeah, there are applications that are very common, but still exploits against them won’t be as universally applicable as Windows ones. You’re likely to find a Linux server with either Samba or nginx or some VNC software but all at once is less common, and there’s a lot of variety with web and VNC servers.


Thank you very much for your explanation.




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