Re: Virus protection for rh5.2

[Bruce Richardson <brichardson lineone net>]

On Sat, 20 Mar 1999, Brian Anderson wrote:

> On Sat, 20 Mar 1999, Mike Martin wrote:
> 
> > Is there any available virus protection for RH 5.2 ?
> > Thanks,
> > Mike M
> 
> 
> to the best of my knowlege, there are no virii for linux, so anti virus
> software doesn't come up much.
> 

Last I heard there are a grand total of 2 Linux viruses.  It's a lot
harder to write a Linux virus - a virus would have to gain root access
before it could do much - and there are easy protection measures - banning
SUID executables from specific partitions etc.  But it can be done and
that means it will be done.

And come to think of it, all those protection measures and nice security
features depend on the system being fully booted.  A Linux system would be
just as vulnerable to a boot-sector virus as DOS is.

There is far more danger from Trojans - witness the tcp_wrappers trojan
recently.  But that was a rare event, which is suprising given how
much we all download and install stuff.

So why isn't it happening more often?  Partly it's the open-source thing -
if you have to distribute the source then people can see your
virus/trojan.  Partly the higher level of difficulty.  Maybe it's because 
most virus writers are adolescent unemployed/students and far fewer of
those will have access to Linux than DOS/Windows (but that is going to
change).  I don't really know and I'd be interested to see what others
think.

Linux virus's will come, though.