| ookaze said: Let me explain this to you a bit better: of course viruses exist on Linux, or I should say ATTEMPTS at viruses, but, listen well, NONE OF THEM WORKS! There's even a HOWTO on making Linux viruses. However, it says from the start that the viruses just won't work at all. Everyone of the viruses you listed just don't work. Notice they're all non-resident virus. Do you know what this means? This means that for your virus to work, you have to specifically login as root, make it executable, and then execute it every time you want to be infected. How retarded is that? And the worst thing is that you cited them without even understanding that you were disproving your point. Let me tell you: typing 'rm' and erasing all of your directory will make more damage than these so-called viruses. Even worse, even if I did the first step of making these things executables on, say, my wife's account, it still wouldn't work AT ALL. Because your virus will be hard pressed to find any ELF file on my wife's account, and even if it did, it would never be used anyway.
To show your ignorance even more, you talk to me about clamav. Of course I know clamav, and of course there are antivirus on Linux, I said that specifically. I also said they are not for Linux, but rather for virus infected data that may pass through a Linux OS, which is for now completely immune to them, and could land on a Windows OS. ClamAV purpose is basically to protect Windows OS, NOT Linux. Go read what the purpose of clamav is and try to understand instead of saying nonsense. Clamav is not a resident antivirus like there are on Windows, for the simple fact that it is NOT necessary. And I know that perfectly well as I use it at home and installed it in big enterprises for their mail proxies, where it is used in majority, to, guess what, protect Windows OS. And no, there are no antivirus for Linux, meaning no resident Linux antivirus like you find on Windows, not even NOD32 does that, it's just useless.
And stop your BS, there was no Unix viruses in the 80s. Perhaps you thought of worms (related to daemons, not to OS), but you're so clueless about the matter, you couldn't understand the difference.
But I'm not surprised you're so clueless, it goes with the rest of what you said. I meet countless clueless people like you in IT. |
First off I am not IT. I do video work. I have used computers a very long time and neither I have I have engaged in ad homonim attacks and called you clueless. Sorry I am not an elitist. Just so you know I do video production and Legal video presentation. I have also been using a computer since 1979 and started with a TRS-80 color computer and moved on to a 2e and than an Apple Lisa.
But trojans were specifically designed and had their orgins in UNIX based systems.
The term 'Trojan horse' was first applied to computer software by computer pioneer Ken Thompson in his 1983 ACM Turing Award lecture. Thompson noted that it is possible to add code to the UNIX "login" command that would accept either the intended encrypted password or a particular known password, allowing a back door into the system with the latter password. He named this invention the "Trojan horse." Furthermore, Thompson argued, the C compiler itself could be modified to automatically generate the rogue code, to make detecting the modification even harder. Because the compiler is itself a program generated from a compiler, the Trojan horse could also be automatically installed in a new compiler program, without any detectable modification to the source of the new compiler.[1]
It is also the same vector that could be used for a sucessful virus as well as buffer overflow issues. Now before you bite my head off and start playing with semantics I know a Trojan Horse does not just spread itself and therefor not a virus unless it is a trojan horse virus but a trojan horse is still a major security risk one that can enable full command of a system through a remote host or even able to dump a text file at a root level. the viruses I posted there were viruses they were mostly harmless in nature but they were still viruses a virus does not have to be. I am sorry but I am going to have to sorly disagree with you about UNIX and Linux being virus immune and security free. But feel free to believe what you want.
Ookaze, just wondering what kind of background do you have that you can spout off superiority like that. through the course of my job I have dealt with people who built the PARC system from the ground up in the 70's. I can't recite word for word what hey would say but they seem to believe that Linux especially has a lot of vectors that would enable the spread of viruses. However I guess the people who actually invented the GUI wouldn't be ableto understand command line or GUI UNIX/Linux. But ehh I guess I am going to have to specifically spell out virus, worms trojan horse on a nontechnical website discussing the security risks of thinking they have an immune system because you know most people who buy a computer really want to know that the thing that is screwing with their computer is a virus or someting else they don't fully understand.
