Virus on LINUX??? Are you out of your mind???

[- Snake -]

Most of us use WINDOWS XP and do face a very common problem of viruses..... many of us had lost our precious data because of a dirty virus....

"But, that only a problem for WIN XP users.... Linux people don't face such problems"

Is the above statement true???? What do you people think.... Is Linux is so secure that no virus can attack it????

I don't think so..... No computer is 100% secure....

 

[Nemesis]

linux does have viruses...but they r peanuts compared 2 the number of viruses that r out there 4 windows...read this article:
*www.theregister.co.uk/2003/10/06/linux_vs_windows_viruses/
since more ppl use windows, a virus attacking windows will do much more damage than a virus attacking linux...

 

[pradeep_chauhan]

The basic construction of linux as an OS makes it very difficult for a virus writer to make malicious code run on a user machine. The access rights to files and the strict owner based privledges also play an important role. Thus even if someone writes a virus for linux the impact of the same would be very limited maybe to a few.

 

[tuxfan]

Even if one Linux box gets infected with virus, it wouldn't spread as it does in case of Windoze viruses!!

There are a few known viruses for linux. But getting infected is not too common and its pretty hard to spread it around. That is what makes it more secure

 

[- Snake -]

See! Linux is the GOD of OSes......

 

[GNUrag]

linux does have viruses...

Wrong there. Linux does not have any known virus yet. What you have heard about are worms. Worms as you know, are caused because of mis-programming in applications that deal with linux networking.

I wrote this in another thread from General Section:
*www.thinkdigit.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=12825&start=45

Fact is that its dam easy to create a virus in Windows... you have a wide array of languages and platforms to choose from.... You know VB, then you can write a trojan, or a word macro virus.... You know Assembly, then write a boot sector virus. You know hardcore C++ and are familiar with Win32 API then write a exe/com/dll file infector. Plus that danger of adwares and spywares... There's no such thing in Linux.

See...

In Linux, we have different users. Normal users have read-write access to only their home directories. They just cannot write to the system files directory like /usr/lib, /usr/bin etc... They cannot write because the filesystem has been designed in that way. No write permissions means no write permissions that's all... So if you do happen to accidently execute a file which is a linux based virus, then at maximum you can infect files in your /home/username directory and no where else....Though yes, if you are running that program as the root user then you can infect your whole system.

There's another good feature called chroot which allows a command or a program to be jailed in a particular directory. The program cannot access any files outside the directory which it has been chrooted (jailed) to. These nifty features are inherently supported in the filesystem and the kernel level.

Yes, Worms are possible in Linux because there's something called setuid bit in the filesystem which allows a program to be executed with permissions of another user, like say the root user.

But with the technologies like selinux ... the system admin can move his jobs to more restrictive users who dont have access to any other directory of program which it is supposed to. The NX technology places more information in the program binary and in collaboration with the processor, no executable and bypass this check. Those who have gone through that RedHat's whitepaper can understand this clearly.

 

[Nemesis]

ahhh thanx 4 clearing that up GNU...btw, i never cared abt differences between worms, viruses, trojans, and what have u... but that was a nice post