[Wolves] Linux viruses

[Chris Ball]

Stuart Langridge wrote:
[A large amount of text]

I agree completely with what you said, and I understand that the loss of 
the home directory would be a huge loss to the user, and a worm with 
write access and network access in your user account would be damaging.
Although, without root access, it would not beable to infect system 
files, have access to the password files, create users, install itself 
as a service or any of the other perks that windows virii enjoy. A virus 
running on a half decent install of linux would be quite limited to what 
it could do when compaired. I wasn't ignoring the fact that viruses will 
still infect linux computers, and I wouldn't be as naive as to suggest 
that linux is perfectly safe from them. It's a matter of time before 
someone sends one out into the wild, especially as there is now more 
government interest in open source solutions.


I suppose my point was that Linux boxes will hopefully never be as wide 
open to attack as most Windows boxes, and that an AV scan on a linux box 
will 99% of the time be limited to a home directory scan, as it's 
unlikely at this moment in time for a virus to be anywhere else.