On Thu, 2001-12-06 at 13:03, Christopher Booth wrote: > "Of course we will see more and more attacks on Windows, but Linux will > be a target because its use is becoming more widespread," said Raimond
I agree with this. There are a couple of main reasons for the current dearth of Linux virii. There's nowhere near as many Linux machines in the field as MS boxen. A related fact is that Linux users are generally more clueful and cautious than your average Windows user. Most virii are released by scr1p7 k1dd13z, and are slightly rehashed versions of older virii. Dump the k1dd1e in an environment without a VB-like GUI tool and without existing virus code to plagiarise, and they're buggered. > Genes, European president for antivirus at Trend Micro. "It is a stable > OS, but it's not a secure OS." Linux' permissions model takes a back seat here. It works, and stops virii from trashing the system in most cases, but it'd be all to easy for Linux worms to propagate. > Jack Clarke, European product manager at McAfee, said: "In fact it's > probably easier to write a virus for Linux because it's open source and > the code is available. So we will be seeing more Linux viruses as the OS > becomes more common and popular." Possibly, but time and time again it's been shown that having access to the source also means that fixes are much quicker in the making. The best example I could find was: http://tuxedo.org/jargon/html/entry/Ping-O%27-Death.html Open Source software has a history of closing security holes in a much more timely fashion than closed source vendors. In the same time it takes an anti-virus company to release updated scanning signatures, there are usually patches to the affected software that stop the problem happening. I think it's inevitable that some Linux worm or other is going to happen along at some point. And when it does, would you rather download an updated set of signatures for your virus scanner, or downloaded an updated email client that closes the hole? Cheers, -- Peter [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
