[Gllug] Spanish company Panda releases free antivirus for Linux

[Kieran Barry]

On Sat, 25 Aug 2001, William Palfreman wrote:

> On Sat, 25 Aug 2001, Chris Ball wrote:
> 
> > On Sat, Aug 25, 2001 at 03:04:10PM +0100, Formi wrote:
> > > The spanish company specialized in antivirus, Panda Software, has released
> > > to the Linux useres its specialized antivirus solution free of charge.
> > 
> > That's really great. Has anyone *ever* had a problem with viruses on
> > UNIX while being vaguely clueful, though?
> 
> 
> Wasn't there a big sendmail worm in 1988?  :-)
> 
You refer to the Robert O. Morris worm. This used holes in 3 different
programs to propagate. These were in sendmail, fingerd and rsh/rexec.

Aha, you say, sendmail! Mail virus!

Well, no. At the time (1988) sendmail was probably more of a pig to
manage than today. The result was that often, mail administration wound
up being done by people that didn't have root (probably because the
admin didn't know enough to get sendmail going).

So sendmail shipped with code which allowed a root shell if you typed
debug. Obviously :)

(One of the pages below claims that fingerd was the main problem.
Nevertheless, I've always heard that sendmail was the big prob.)

Clearly, this was a bug in sendmail rather than a virus contained in
mail messages. 

<troll>And if everyone back then had been running qmail as nature
intended, it would never have happened...</troll>

Readable:
http://www.ee.ryerson.ca:8080/~elf/hack/iworm.html
http://www.ja.net/CERT/Cheswick/berferd.txt

regards

Kieran


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