Re: good anti-virus software to use?

[Andrei Popescu <andreimpopescu@gmail.com>]

Kamaraju Kusumanchi <raju.mailinglists@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Friday 21 April 2006 04:19, Johannes Wiedersich wrote:
> > Also linux viruses occur only very seldom -- probably because of linux's
> > different security approach.
> 
> Could it be because there are less number of desktop users using Linux than
> windows?
> 
> raju

Of course this can be a factor, but ...

A virus multiplies by infecting a host organism, in our case a computer
program, by copying itself inside that program so it gets run each time
the program is run. This is difficult to achieve in linux because of
proper privilege separation and file permissions. Even if a user runs an
infected program, it can infect only programs where the user has write
permissions. Even binaries in /usr/bin are owned by root with
permissions 755, so there are few potential "victims", unless you run
the infected program as root. That's a good reason not to run your
computer as root ;)

Andrei
-- 
If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.
(Albert Einstein)