Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on December 03, 2005 08:22 PM
I'm really skeptical about the "Linux is immune to viruses" attitude. It sounds like fool's pride to me. We Linux users do have strength in diversity, better system design, smarter userbase and a smaller target but..
When I think of a regular desktop distro, many of them install with many services open and without setting up a firewall or automated security patching. If a virus can get in through a vulnerability in one of those services or through user action, it might create a server program in userspace with gcc or perl and start spreading to other machines with known vulnerabilities. You don't need to get rooted to do that. And so few of us use virus scanners, that it might go unnoticed for a while.
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Linux virus threat
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on December 03, 2005 08:22 PMWhen I think of a regular desktop distro, many of them install with many services open and without setting up a firewall or automated security patching. If a virus can get in through a vulnerability in one of those services or through user action, it might create a server program in userspace with gcc or perl and start spreading to other machines with known vulnerabilities. You don't need to get rooted to do that. And so few of us use virus scanners, that it might go unnoticed for a while.
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