Re: Linux Virus
On Thu, Mar 29, 2001 at 01:33:30PM +1000, John Griffiths wrote:
> t 10:29 PM 3/28/2001 -0500, Ben Collins wrote:
> >On Thu, Mar 29, 2001 at 01:26:39PM +1000, John Griffiths wrote:
> >> >IMO, this is nothing completely new or innovative. ASM has been around a
> >> >long time, even before viruses. It all boils down to people being smart
> >> >enough not to accept attachments form people they don't know, and
> >> >especially don't execute programs sent to you randomly over the
> >> >internet.
> >>
> >> Agreed up to a point. But all you need is one person to open it blind and then the rest go out to the adsress book and appear (to the next recipients) to be someone they know. which alters the balance somewhat.
> >
> >Good point...kind of a "the chain is only as strong as its weakest link"
> >scenario :)
> >
>
> Also worth noting that the last few headline virusses on windows have done no more damage than a user-level virus operating on a unix machine.
>
> they have been notable in the denial of service aspects of their replication, and the cunning nature of their social engineering.
Arguably, there is less of a chance of that under Linux. Most people who
use Windows (like 99.9%) use either Outlook, Eudora or Netscape for
email. On Linux, the numbers cannot be used against it. If you target a
Linux virus for Pine, or whatever, chances are you wont propogate very
far. Trying to write a virus that works on "most" Linux email clients is
beyond the scope of a small viral program.
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/ Ben Collins -- ...on that fantastic voyage... -- Debian GNU/Linux \
` bcollins@debian.org -- bcollins@openldap.org -- bcollins@linux.com '
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