Morgan Storey wrote: > I think it is going to come back and bite the Linux community if we go > via the line that we are immune to viruses,
Unfortunately, the alternative, virus scanners that look for particular virus signatures is nothing more than security theatre. Firstly, inew viruses can be written so fast that the virus detection engines have absolutely no way of keep up. Secondly, self modifing polymorphic virses have been around for at least a decade. That means for an instruction set like x86, for any set of 1000 instructions there are probably 10s of thousands of ways to rewrite those 1000 instructions so they behave the same but won't be detected by a scanner that detects the original. The *only* 100% safe way to guard against viruses to fix all the security holes that viruses exploit. That means better coding practices. Erik -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Erik de Castro Lopo http://www.mega-nerd.com/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
