On Mon, 24 Feb 2003 16:03:27 -0800 (PST) Minimochi <minimochi2003@yahoo.com> wrote:
Is it possible to have viruses in linux? never heard of that before!
All of these anti-virus programs for linux, are for scanning windows files, from linux, especially mail. The threat to linux is growing however, do a search on http://freshmeat.net for the "linux virus writing howto". There are ways to attack elf files, but they do not spread easily as in the windows OS. Don't sweat yet, it's still very hard to do, and you are more likely to get a worm or trojan from precompiled rpm's from unknown sources. I worry alot about that. I assume the big distributions are pretty honest, but they could easily slip back doors into their rpms if they wanted( or were secretly asked to by governments, in the "interest of national security", of course.). If they do try it, they will probably do a very good job of it, since they aren't hackers, they can afford the best programmers. So things would be well hidden, and you would have to be very smart to detect it. Probably alot of assembly level stuff, writing invisible files to empty disk space, and reading it off when you go online. Hmm, sounds like WindowsXP, :-). --use Perl; #powerful programmable prestidigitation