Zaheer Mohamed Kozhakkaniyil wrote:
> I've never heard of any GNU/Linux system being attacked by a virus. 
there are some worms (not viruses) which attack linux, like the lupper 
worm and slupper worm. they attack mainly the web servers. they scan the 
ip addresses randomly from an infected machine. if they finds a web 
server with vulnerable php or cgi scripts they will get copied into the 
server. they then sits there as a back door. they can accept remote 
commands and can be used for DoS attacks and password harvesting.
to prevent such infections take the following precautions on servers.
1. patch the vulnerable softwares like php, awstat etc
2. chmod programs like wget, make, curl etc so that it is executable 
only by root.
3. mount /tmp as a seperate partition with noexec and nosuid flags set 
and all other tmps (like /var/tmp, /usr/tmp etc) should be a symlink to 
this.

> But Anti-Virus softwares are coming up even then... I guess it is better to 
> be prepared. AVG has come up with a Free edition for GNU/Linux home users. 
> More at http://free.grisoft.com/doc/20/lng/us/tpl/v5 
>   
this may because of the increasing use of linux in a mixed environment 
(linux and windows). windows viruses go unnoticed in linux machines when 
users share files between windows and linux. so the virus can remain in 
the computer and later infect when the files are copied back to windows. 
also in the case of a samba machine, if we don't provide an antivirus in 
linux samaba server, it can become a virus server since it will be 
dealing mainly with windows machines.
pls note that linux is not at all friendly for viruses and worms. it is 
our configuration of the linux make it vulnerable. bad configuration = 
bad server.
> Zaheer M K
> GNU/Linux user #351122
> Registered at http://counter.li.org 
>   
thank you

-- 
anu bhaskar
linux administrator
spectrum softtech solutions
ph: 91 484 2345 922
www.spectrum.net.in
www.spectramedi.com


Reply via email to