Re: Antivirus recommendation for Win 95

Tom Holub asks:
>Do you know of examples of Unix viruses in the wild?

  From 15 minutes of Googling ...

  You may recall that Robert Morris's Internet worm in 1988 was one of
the first computer worms to draw widespread attention, and that
this worm was written for Unix systems
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm>.

  In the years which have followed, there have continued to be a modest
number of Unix/Linux worms detected in the wild, many of which merely
try to exploit well-known, remotely-accessible vulnerabilities, perhaps
often thus obtaining privilege escalation, and in so doing, propagate
from machine to machine. In most cases, these vulnerabilities have
been quickly patched within the affected Unix and/or Linux
communities, so the number of vulnerable hosts has been small.

  Because the privileges under which most users of Unix or Linux
systems are usually running generally don't permit alteration of
interesting files or processes, it has been difficult for true Unix/Linux
viruses to spread. Thus, these viruses have been either rare or
non-existent in the wild, depending on which analysis you choose to
believe. Several authors have expressed the opinion that Bliss
for Linux may be the sole example of malicious code with
virus-like characteristics found in the wild:

  http://www.viruslist.com/eng/viruslist.html?id=3134

Aron Roberts
Workstation Software Support Group

P.S. FYI: Here's a partial list of Linux viruses, worms, and trojans.
("Partial," because Kapersky Labs claims to have identified 37 new,
distinct viruses and worms in 2000 alone):

<http://www.viruslist.com/eng/viruslistfind.html?rub4=001&findWhere=&findTxt=linux>

  And here's a list of anti-virus utilities for Linux:

<http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/openantivirus/mini-faq/av-unix_e.txt?rev=HEAD>

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Received on Tue Aug 24 21:22:27 2004