Firstly, a worm is not a virus. Worms are more like Trojan Horses, in that
they exploit security holes and use them to open systems from the inside.
Besides that, this isn't a bad article. Here, I shall use the word "virus" to
represent all viruses, Trojans and worms (and anything else I may have left
out), for the sake of simplicity.
This whole incident really lets you appreciate how good open source and Linux
is. In the M$ world, if virus/worm/Trojan exploited WinDOS weaknesses and
holes (and there are plenty of them) what would M$ do about it? Absolutely
nothing. The sane thing to do would be to actually *fix* these holes so the
offending programme is now immune to the threat. This is what Red Hat did,
and the speed at which it was done could only have been possible with open
source. A closed source company, on the other hand, must spend $$$ to fix
these problems, and they have found that it is far cheaper to simply hide the
problem as much as possible and pass the blame onto virus scanning companies
(e.g. Symantec) for not finding and eradicating the virus/Trojan/worm. Virus
scanning companies work quickly, at great expense, to find how to defeat the
virus, and then pass the expenses onto the consumer by charging for the boxed
product and updates. Of course, no virus scanner is perfect (as tests always
show), and some viruses slip through. Since the system is still hole-ridden,
there is nothing to stop the virus. This is a far from perfect situation.
On Wed, 24 Jan 2001 07:39, Anthony Daniell wrote:
> I found thid story this morning on the linux.org site.
>
> http://www.mobilecomputing.com/shownews.cgi?1347
>
> Just visiting this planet
> have a nice day.
> Jesus is Love.
> Anthony Daniell
--
Sridhar Dhanapalan.
"There are two major products that come from Berkeley:
LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence."
-- Jeremy S. Anderson
