All distributions are not created equal: Some distros, by default, are very secure; others install with virtually no default security. A good source of independent information on the quality of distro security is www.distrowatch.com, a site that supports the idea that some distros offer better security than others.
As a rule, some of the most popular and feature-laden distros, such as Fedora Core 3 , are not built with immediate, instantaneous security in mind. But I've never found a Linux distro that an educated user can't make secure. Just remember that one size does not fit all: You always make a tradeoff between convenience and security. A knowledgeable user can lock down just about any distro tight--so tight that it's hard to get anything accomplished.
It's also up to users to keep an eye out for new vulnerabilities that appear all the time in various distros. The day I wrote this, in fact, Conectiva, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Mandrake, Red Hat, and Suse all sported new security-related updates, as discussed at www.linuxsecurity.com.
Over the years, I've installed a number of distros almost since the day they hatched. My current favorites for out-of-the-box security include Trustix, EnGarde, and Immunix, as well as the hardened versions of Gentoo and Debian. "Hardening" means that a distro vendor or developers have plugged standard security gaps, such as buffer overruns, right down to the compiler and even to the library level.
Read this full article at Security Pipeline
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