At 10:21 PM 5/6/98 -0700, you wrote:
>
>> >There is one, somewhere, but it's pretty much ignored. Unix, in
general, is
>> >pretty much invulnerable to virus's.
>>
>> Invulnerable? What intrinsic quality grants Unix this remarkable
privilege?
>
>it doesn't allow hardware level access -- at least not as easily as, say,
>MS-DOS or windows( <= 3.x , 95). that knocks out boot sector viruses (the
>only kind I can honestly say I was exposed to 'in the wild').
Until the word-macro viruses, the vast majority were boot related (mbr, or
at the start of partions), so you stuck an infected floppy in your a:
drive, and attempted to boot off of it, thus allowing the virus to execute,
and write its self to your hard disk. So, as Linux users do not reboot so
often, they are unlikely to do this. Next, the system boots of the hard
disk, the virus loads, and grabs the bios disk interrupt. This way, it can
write to any floppies you access. This works fine under dos/win3.1 but
protected mode OSs at the least ignore the virus in memory (and thus it
cannot infect other floppies), or can be rendered unbootable.
Thus, viri are not much of a threat to Linux, or for that matter, NT, OS/2,
Be, or what have you. Though you may have to reinstall your boot loader.
And of course, for the macro viruses, you have to be running MS Office,
which is not yet a problem Linux users have.
You could have a shell script virus, that infected shell scripts, but the
permission issue would likely prevent its spread.
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