On Sat, 14 Nov 1998, Neil Moore-Smith wrote:
> I never hear of viruses in the Linux (or Unix generally) world. There used
> to be the Internet Worm, but mostly, the only attacks I hear about are
> security exploits, holes in sendmail etc.
>
> Are there any Linux viruses? I would have thought that the availability of
> the source code would have been a real boon to the sad individuals who
> write these things. Are there anti-virus tools?
Not really; these individuals only understand 8088 and, less frequently, 68000
assembly language. :)
In any case, once you have the source code, you can do a lot more than write
viruses. Writing a virus, for example the typical one that spreads through
executable files, for Linux would be a fairly trivial exercise. What makes it
difficult is that for the virus to do any damage, it would have to hack root.
And a virus isn't a virus unless it spreads from user to user. And to spread,
it would have to hack root everywhere, in a repeated fashion.
You could give a virus binary to an unsuspecting user as a trojan horse, and it
could then infect all of that user's executable files. If that user runs the
binary as root, then the virus could infect your system files. But the damage
would likely be confined to that one user.
On shitbox operating systems like Windows or MacOS, there is no idea of a user
ID or file permissions. All users effectively run as ``root'', so a virus
doesn't have to launch any security attacks on the system in order to spread;
it just needs careless users who download and share binary files.
Even on NT, many people run with admin privileges. The NT system encourages
such mistakes. There is no root account that you can log in as, and even if
there were, it's a hassle to log in as someone else because you have to log
out! Instead, what happens is that users get adminstrative privileges. Doh!
And of course, the prime user of a workstation invariably has such privileges.
The UNIX paradigm is infinitely superior. To do anything with system files, you
have to be root. You don't have to log out of your desktop to be root, just
``su'' yourself in.
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