Elementary OS Updates And Security

Question

I am very, very new to Linux. I am taken aback at how upon installing elementaryOS I was immediately hit with a series of "updates" to various functionalities.

How do I know these updates are safe? Or even what they did to my machine? How do I know there wasn't a MIM attack, or if my machine has been compromised with a keylogger or something? Is there a way to check whatever's going on my machine against some kind of "official" version?

Sorry if this is an idiot question, I am new to all of this but I hear you can do that with opensource stuff?

Answer 1

Updates are provided by the repositories available on your system. The safety depends on multiple factors, a proper summary can be found here: https://askubuntu.com/questions/35629/are-ppas-safe-to-add-to-my-system-and-what-are-some-red-flags-to-watch-out-for

Answer 2

It's not a dumb question. If the updates were done through the App Store, it would be fine. You could also update using the command line console

(this is the command)

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

Hope this helps you.