Steve Holdoway wrote: > Well, ignoring the ensuing flame war as to whether a worm is a virus > ( it certainly is in this context! ), the first ever virus was unix > based.
Actually, I believe CHRISTMA EXEC predated the Morris worm, and that was on IBM System/370. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_Tree_EXEC The Morris worm did not propagate via file sharing or e-mail; ClamAV would not have been effective against it. All systems (including UNIX ones) are vulnerable to Morris-worm-like programs that exploit buffer overflows or dumb programming errors. Windoze machines are uniquely vulnerable to e-mail viruses because they encoded metadata such as "executable-ness" in filenames, an astoundingly stupid decision. > I am absolutely certain that, once there's a market for it, > non-windows viruses will appear. There *is* already a huge market for a Linux virus. The market is different from the Windows market. In the Windows world, the motivation of virus writers is to subvert PCs to build botnets. In the Linux world, the motivation is publicity -- could you imagine the coup of creating an effective Linux virus? That's why I don't think viruses will be anywhere near the problem in UNIX-like systems compared to Windoze. Regards, David. _______________________________________________ Help us build a comprehensive ClamAV guide: visit http://wiki.clamav.net http://lurker.clamav.net/list/clamav-users.html
