> Never say never ... Well, let's just say "highly unlikely", then. :)
> actually, anomy for instance pulls the teeth on any shell script > attached to email (i.e., putting an "exit" immediately after the shell That's quite ingenious. Still, executing shell scripts (or other executables) as root is what people running Linux have to worry about, because they can have nasty side effects. These are referred to as "trojans" because, like the Trojan horse of antiquity, they are packaged in something that looks on the surface to be completely innocuous, but when ran can do a lot of nasty things. True virii (the self-replicating kind) are unlikely on Linux and even on Windows, although there are in the neighborhood of tens of thousands of these running on the old DOS platform, seem to be less frequent nowadays, with the focus shifted to trojans / virii that replicate in people's email boxes and so forth. I personally only have been affected by virii twice, on a DOS system, and both occurences were completely unrelated to getting sofware from the "ether" (BBSes in those days; I was a fairly active BBSer). Virii back then were more prevalent because people would normally reboot from a large variety of floppies to play games and such, and routinely copy other people's floppies. > In any case, many windoze virii depend on the users gullility to create > an entry, much lower likelyhood that this will happen to a linux user Well, get someone on aol and you've got a sucker. :) Lots of crazy stuff goes on there, pyramid schemes, password phishers, etc. People need to learn not to open virus/trojan infected email. We all know the likely source of the problem - bad defaults (especially in Outlook) that enable this stuff. Linux is certainly less prone to these problems, but still, distributions such as Red Hat enabling all services by defualt aren't going to lessen any possible impact. > For instance, I believe it is technically possible to create a virus > laden rpm - I have never heard of it happening, but you should only get Trojans are more likely - I don't think a true virus, one that self- replicates as part of executable code is really possible, but one could (and probably easily) make an RPM with an install script that wipes the user's files. :( Obviously, RPMS need to be installed as root. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ David E. Fox Thanks for letting me [EMAIL PROTECTED] change magnetic patterns [EMAIL PROTECTED] on your hard disk. -----------------------------------------------------------------------
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