Re: good anti-virus software to use?
Paul Johnson wrote:
Yes, but who runs that 5%? Businesses you want to compromise? Government
agency you dislike? There are a number of reasons a platform is targeted.
On the other hand, I feel that Windows gets targeted more because it's an easy
target: Which would you rather try to crack or crash? The OS with 5% of the
world's bugs, or 95%?
This argument doesn't quite hold water. The first really successful
Trojan Horse was the Internet Worm, which attacked Unix systems and
VAX/VMS.
I think it has more to do with the cheap and easy systems to get
in the days when viruses really got started were the MSDOS machines.
They were the best documented, as well.
Most of the early viruses were boot sector infectors, as well,
like the Brain, Michaelangelo, etc. And for that you need a
machine which is willing to boot off of a floppy. In those days,
that meant an MSDOS/PCDOS machine.
I also think that there are a lot of people still for whom
"computer" means "computer running a MicroSoft OS". I recall
an on-going battle I had with a woman in Corporate at a company
where I used to work. She regularly (like two to three times per
month) sent out messages to "all" (meaning everyone in the
company, thousands of employees) with in-line inclusions of
Word format documents, some megabytes in size. This didn't
look to good in Pine on a Sun/Solaris machine. I requested
that she stop sending me those messages repeatedly, and nicely
I thought. Finally, I started quoting them in-line so that
her Outlook could not recognize them as Word, and sending them
back.
She started complaining that I was doing "mean" things to her,
and I tried repeatedly to explain to her that *she* was doing
it to *me*, and I was just trying to get her to understand
how obnoxious she was being. Her reply was "Well, just click
on the attachment, and look at it!".
Eventually, she turned me over to the Corporate Net Police,
as an e-mail abuser. When I actually got to talk to someone
who knew that not the whole world is Windows, he said he'd
take her aside and explain what was going on. He'd looked
at the cached/saved e-mails I'd sent her, and agreed that
I was actually being pretty nice in my messages.
She had no concept that anything else existed. For her,
computer == MicroSoft Windows == Word.
Also, Linux users tend to be more technically minded and able to
correctly administer their own computers.
That might be true of the administrators, but not necessarily of the users.
Everyone where I work is a Linux and HP/UX user, but they're not the ones
maintaining the machines.
Yep. And it's going to become even more so as time goes by.
I use chkrootkit and rkhunter about once a week.
Mike
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