[ale] Virus in Linux

[newcombe at aa.csc.peachnet.edu (Dan Newcombe)]

> I must be missing something here but I thought Linux did not have a virus threat.
> I saw Mcafee antivirus for Linux today at their ftp site. Does anyone know about this?

They are rare for Unix but they do exist.  Most of the time they are 
some sort of trojan horse program instead of a virus.    Looking at 
Mcafee's site, the one for Linux is used to scan PC (ie. DOS/WINDOWS) 
files stored/hosted on a Linux box.

The reason Unix viri are so rare is because of all the permission 
settings.  If Joe User ran a program with a virus, he won't have the 
rights to infect /bin/ls or anything really.  Root could...

Linux is not 100% immune from DOS viri either.  A DOS virus which hoses 
the partition table, or just randomly starts scambling data on a disk 
could affect Linux indirectly.

	-Dan

--
Dan Newcombe - Clayton State College - User Services - 770-961-3421 
newcombe at aa.csc.peachnet.edu  http://www.csc.peachnet.edu/home/dan/
-  I just want to be free - I'm happy to be lonely.
                                    Marillion, Misplaced Childhood