Re: Scary article in Wall Street Journal today
On Thu, 18 Feb 2010 22:43:31 +0000
Tom Furie <tom@furie.org.uk> wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 04:04:09PM -0600, John Hasler wrote:
>
> > Mark writes:
> > > ...is it a correct statement to say that these spyware/malware/virus
> > > .exe type files that try to install on a given machine, are virtually
> > > useless against Debian systems unless the user logs in as root to
> > > allow installation?
> >
> > If they are Microsoft Windows ".exe type files" (which, AFAIK, they all
> > are) they are completely useless against Debian systems because they
> > will not run at all.
>
> Unless you have Wine installed, then it may or may not run. Whether the
> payload would be effective or not is another matter.
This is quite funny:
http://www.linux.com/archive/feed/42031
"Linux just isn't user-friendly when it comes to viruses. You have to
work to find and run them. It doesn't happen automatically as it does
with Windows. The GNU/Linux folks really should improve this glaring
discrepancy. ...
Out of the five Windows viruses I ran under Wine, not a single one was
able to send email and propagate itself. When I went out of my way to
be part of the Windows community by doing my part to propagate Windows
viruses (lots of Windows users seem to think this is important, seeing
as how they run random executables and use Microsoft Outlook and
Internet Explorer) I discovered that it couldn't easily be done with
GNU/Linux tools. Oh sure, I could manually forward these viruses to the
folks in my address book, but where's the fun in that? Besides, these
viruses usually lie in the From: line and use a handful of different
Subject: lines. As a GNU/Linux user, I really don't want to miss out on
these important functionalities."
And see:
http://blog.opensourcenerd.com/i-can-haz-virus
Celejar
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