[Wolves] Linux viruses

[Peter Cannon]

On Monday 06 December 2004 16:06, Stuart Langridge wrote:

> e. Virus scanning
> A virus scanner can (potentially) intercept a virus and identify it as
> such before it has a chance to do any damage. Virus scanners don't
> really exist for Linux, because there aren't any Linux viruses to scan
> for. ClamAV scans for all the viruses it knows about, which are all
> Windows viruses at the moment (as far as I am aware). If Linux viruses
> start to exist then it will no doubt check for those too. Ade's
> contention on this is that Windows people are all aware of the virus
> problem and therefore have antivirus software running: Linux people do
> not, because they think that they are invulnerable. So when Linux
> viruses do start to appear, people will have to be convinced to start
> running AV software (unlike Windows people, who already have been
> convinced, although in a rather painful way).

I did have CamAV running until I read on their site that all this did was 
A. Scanned your system for known viruses.
B. Tell you that you have them. ???
C. Do nothing. !!!

They go on to say that cleaning viruses is pointless (I disagree) and if I 
read the writers train of thought correctly if you find you've got any, wipe 
your machine and do a restore from the last clean backup you have!

IMHO pretty useless, surfice to say I'm in a fortunate position that I can use 
SOPHOS which I have gone back to, plus KMail now supports SOPHOS too so a 
bonus on both levels.

Contrary to popular belief that the Linux community is a friendly, open, 
project/OS there are evil idiots out there I feel certain that some retard 
will write a virus for Linux because they think it funny or that they are a 
clever so and so.



-- 
Regards,
Peter Cannon.
peter at cannon-linux.freeserve.co.uk

"There is every excuse for not knowing
there is no excuse for not asking"
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