[wellylug] Virus

[Stephen Judd]

On Mon, 2002-03-25 at 19:10, Lindsay Hunter wrote:

> One question however.  Is it not possible to write virii for Linux?  I find
> that hard to accept.  I do accept that the risk is far lower and likely to
> remain lower for some time yet.

It certainly is, and I recently read an article somewhere that outlined
how one might go about it: see here:
http://wildsau.idv.uni-linz.ac.at/~k3032e4/virus-writing-HOWTO/_html/

However, life is made harder for the Linux virus writer that wants to
use email as a vector, because few people read their mail as root, and
the Linux software ecology is more diverse. Not all Linux boxes are x86,
for a start!

There has been one Linux worm I can think of - the so-called Ramen worm
- which targeted specific broken Red Hat Apache installs. Even that
didn't get very far.

If desktop Linux ever becomes widespread, in a way that makes it
neccessary for users to be root a lot of the time (think how NT/Win2K
encourages one to run with administrator privilege to get stuff done -
if only there were "su" for NT!) then maybe we would see more Linux
viruses.

Stephen


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