[luau] Virus Scan/Checker

MonMotha monmotha at indy.rr.com
Sat Aug 17 11:10:00 PDT 2002


Dan George wrote:
> I need a good virus scanner like Innoculate for Linux.  Any suggestions. 
> I just got hammered with a virus and had to wipe out all my data on my 
> laptop
> before I tried to send any emails to anyone.  I noticed this when I was 
> unable to send emails to my intented clients and instead they were going 
> to a folder which I guess someone created a user account on disguised as 
> a MPLUG member.  I didnt check everyone on the list, which was my 
> mistake, and
> assumed it could have been someone on the list I didnt know.  The email 
> was disquised as a newbie needing hardware compliant PDA for 7.3.
> 
> Dan


I have yet to see a virus scanner for Linux that checks for Linux 
viruses.  Most of the scanners are for mail gateways an proxies to check 
inbound things for Windows (and sometimes Mac) viruses.  However, I 
think Norton may make one (I think it's able to detect a whole two viruses).

The reason?  Linux basically has no viruses.  There have been a couple 
"proof of concept" things, but they're usually never seen in the wild, 
outside of Norton or whoever (insert conspiracy theory here).

The reason for this is that, unless you're being an idiot (or you're 
running Lindows, don't get me started), you don't go cruising around as 
root all the time.  Under Win9x and NT, people normally go cruising 
around with sufficient privilages to infect system binaries and cause 
major damage.  Under Linux, only root (and often the user bin, which 
isn't able to log in) has the privilages needed to accomplish that.  So, 
should a user run an infected executable under Linux, it can only infect 
the binaries that are owned by the user.  These are few and far between.

--MonMotha




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