Michael Letourneau wrote:
I think people are confusing virus with Trojan. From my old PC support
days, most of the virii that were in the wild were tied to Office
documents, or existed on boot sectors of floppies and hard drives.
Nothing to "execute" there. I think it would be pretty easy for a virus
to exist on linux systems. There is no requirement that it destroy the
system, no requirement that it has root privileges, nor any requirement
that it affects more than one person. All it takes is OpenOffice to have
a hole that can be utilized, or Thunderbird, or Kmail or any application
that most desktop linux users would use. That would allow the user to be
infected, and to attempt to affect others. Sounds like a virus to me.
But yes it would be restricted to the privileges that that user has. But
nothing stops a linux desktop user from launching a bunch of process' that
would make it as much of a zombie machine as a desktop windows box.
A boot sector virus is executed every time the computer is booted. Any
OS can be vulnerable to a boot sector virus during booting, because the
OS is not running at that time. The only protection is what's provided
with the BIOS. On the other hand computers running protected operating
systems, such as Linux or OS/2 cannot be infected when running, as they
have mechanisms to prevent it. DOS and DOS based versions of Windows
(3.1, 95, 98 etc) do not have such protection and can be infected
whenever the virus is run.
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