virus 1

[Jeremy Fowler]

There aren't that many Linux viruses, the few that I know of are worms (Sadman,
li0n, etc.) that have shown up. Most of these take advantage of vulnerabilities
in the OS and certain packages normally installed with various distributions.
They aren't anywhere as common as Windows viruses, but they do exist. I suppose
the reason anyone writes a virus is to see if they could do it. Not necessarily
intent on causing havoc or all out anarchy, but rather to get developers working
on a solution. I personally feel that virii are a necessary evil. They keep
people on top of their game. Without viruses and various other threats system
security would be a lot more lax, and software companies and groups would be
slow to release fixes for certain vulnerabilities. Virus shine a spot light on
them and forces them to update their code immediately, and it make software more
secure in the long run. They spur advancement in new technology and weed out
lazy system administrators. There are a lot of different virus scanners
available for Linux. Sophos Sweep, Kaspersky Lab Antiviral Toolkit Pro(AVP), NAI
Virusscan (Uvscan), H+BEDV AntiVir/X, CyberSoft VFind, Trend Micro FileScanner,
CAI InoculateIT, F-Secure AV, to name a few. ;-) I use AVP and uvscan myself for
our email server with AMaViS scanning all incoming and outgoing email from
postfix. Works pretty slick and keeps out all the common nasties.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: dlegion [mailto:dlegion at yahoo.com]
> Sent: Thursday, November 15, 2001 11:16 PM
> To: kclug at kclug.org
> Subject: virus ?
>
>
> Is there a linux antivirus program outthere, does linux need somthing like
> that.  I'v been downloading and viewing all sorts of things but have not ran
> into a virus one!  I know that if I downloaded like this in windows I would
> have contracted a virus if I did not have some sort of protection.
> If linux does not need such a thing , Why?
>
> Thank You.
> Aldis A Tuck
>
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