[techtalk] Question for the group

[Vinnie Surmonde]

On Thu, 14 Oct 1999, Clare Smith wrote:

> One of my unix students ask me if unix/linux had the same plethora of
> viruses that Windows/NT has. While I couldn't sight any statistics, I said I
> hadn't heard of any successful unix/linux viruses. I did some research this
> morning and still can't come up with any hard data. Any ideas?

I know of at least one virus for linux...darned if I can remember what
it's called though :)

In general un*x (including linux) is less prone to viruses because of
security -- to get ahold of resources you'd have to somehow trigger the
virus as root, which hopefully (as root) you woudln't do...the average
user cannot (unless they exploit a security hole) write to the master boot
record or otherwise gain too much control of the system...making
propagation harder

plus the hardware that most other unixes run on (sparc, IBM risc boxes,
Digital Alpha, etc) are generally more secure than PC architecture, which
helps some too..not to mention, as someone else pointed out, that viruses
can't (? I'll bet someone could prove me wrong :) but it's definetly
unlikely :) ) cross platforms, so you might get all the linux-on-ix86
users, but not all linux users, much less all unix users :)

and the internet worm was a worm, not a virus :) 

Vinnie
--
Reality is a formality, an agreed upon set of lies -- J.D. Catron
Obligatory pathetic website at http://george.he.net/~drachen



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