On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 9:31 AM, Manoj Vivek <[email protected]> wrote: > hello,,, > Why there is no viruses in linux?? why cant the windows viruses be > ported to linux,,
Here is a crude example for why they can't be ported. Let's say you have a simple virus for windows 98 which will, when executed, delete every file on C drive. If you port it to Linux, you would want to do something that would delete everything in the root directory. That won't work unless you are root. The most damage that you can cause by a virus (if it runs as a non-admin user) is tamper with the files in the home directory. The assets that are targeted by a virus are different. I can think of two other reasons why there are fewer viruses for gnu/linux systems. First, the attack vectors are different. On MS platforms, you would try to exploit a certain bug in a software running (for example say explorer). The same software is seldom available on gnu/linux systems and thus same vulnerabilities can rarely be exploited to attack a gnu/linux system. Second, and somewhat related to the previous point, most viruses spread in binary executable form. These executable are OS dependent. They are programs after all and need to call some OS dependent system calls to do basic stuff (for example read() and write() to access hard drive). These are again different from MS OSes and linux systems (and you again have the same problem of running exe file in Linux). This is not to say that there are no virus or no attack on linux systems but they are very few and less potent. There are rootkits available which can be hard to get rid of but they wouldn't be call viruses (they have human intelligence behind them)? Hopefully, this sheds some more light on the subject. SB -- LUG@IITD - http://lug-iitd.org/Footer
