On Fri, Mar 12, 2004, Bill Bennett wrote:
> I had been asked why Linux was immune to the wave of viruses that have
> been pillaging Microsoft-oriented machines. To be honest, I didn't
> have a ready reply.
My opinion is that it's not.
It's immune to those particular viruses, just like humans are largely
immune to whatever nasty epidemics are plagueing the fish world at the
moment. But it is not in principle immune to the type of viruses
plaguing Windows machines at the moment.
As best I can tell, the usual Linux-virus argument goes "Linux users
don't normally login with privileges that would let a virus ruin their
machine!"
The trouble is, most well-known Windows viruses these days don't ruin
machines either. They abuse network resources, and your bog-standard
unprivileged Linux user normally also has enough privileges to abuse
network resources. The current set of viruses require:
1) privileges to read your web cache and address book
2) privileges to send email
3) privileges to install
Well, most Linux users could give a virus 1 and 2, should it infect
their machine. At present 3 would require user intervention on most mail
clients, but there's no in principle problem with installing programs as
a regular user. People do it all the time, for perfectly legitmate
reasons. And some Windows viruses still also require user intervention
for 3, although they avoid it if they can, but that doesn't mean those
viruses don't spread.
In practice, it may be that user-level Free Software tools that normally
run on Linux machines are designed with a little more caution ("OK,
let's assume that someone wanted to wrek havoc using this software and
this nifty new feature -- what could they do?" rather than the "let's
assume that a benevolent person wants maximum flexibility -- what do
they want?"). However, I can't honestly see an argument that Linux is
actually *immune* to the type of network resource-abusing viruses that
are the common and costly ones around today. Particular software may or
may not be more or less vulnerable.
-Mary
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