>A friend told me that there are some Linux viruses around. I did not
>believe him, I told him that viruses are only a DOS & Windows phenomenon.
>Am I right?
I have to agree with Mr. Hills, I'm afraid that you are mistaken here.
In
fact, it can be argued that Unix was the platform on which the most famous
virus resided. The Internet Worm of 1987 written by Robert Morris crashed
thousands of computers and entire portions of the Internet. This was not a
virus, but a worm. A worm functions like a virus and (can) replicate like a
virus but does not need to attach itself to a host file.
Anyway, there is no reason that a virus can't reside on any platform
which
currently exists. It is true, however, that virii for Linux are much more
rare
than those for DOS/Windows and even Mac, although the number is
increasing monthly. Mr. Hills stated that the reason for this is solely
because of the
popularity of DOS/Windows machines. I have to disagree with him here. That
is
certainly a reason, but only about about half of the total picture.
DOS/Windows
operating systems are very easy to write programs for and the security of
these systems is not even comparable to a *nix based system.
For example, there is little that you can do to prevent a program from
changing
your file attributes in DOS/Windows, but in Linux, the program, user, etc.
has to
have permission to change attributes (and subsequently alter a file's
contents).
I hope that you all don't mind my added (possibly unnecessary)
information, but
I do enjoy a good virus discussion.
Boot Sector
