On Saturday 31 January 2004 10:39 pm, Victor Odhner wrote:
> technomage wrote:
> > try www.free-av.com.
> > they have a linux capable virus scanner (it uses the dazuko engine) and
> > can auto-update daily if set so.
> >
> > I use it here and its been a real life saver. :)
>
> Hey Mage,
>
> What kind of lives has it saved?
mine mostly.
>
> I know that virus scanning is used on mail servers under
> Linux, to prevent passing on Microsoft viruses.
ery true. I use it here to scan the samba shares with my room mates who use 
windows.

>
> I know that there have been worms (I guess Morris wrote the book
> before Microsoft became the prime target) that could exploit
> sendmail, etc.  But the *nix world has tightened up in the past
> decade or so.
yeah. old news mostly. :)

>
> I also know that Linux is not exempt from viruses, though
> if you don't let them have root there's a limit to the
> harm they can do.  I suppose if you actually executed one
> (what did they call that, the "courtesy virus" or something?)
> it could use an ordinary account to launch a DOS attack
> and publish your address book.
well, 12 or 15 virii, worms, and trojans and 6 types of rootkit are pretty 
much it. compare that to the 70,000+ for windows based systems and you begin 
to wonder....

>
> But I'm not aware of anything worth mentioning that's been in
> the wild over the past few years.
t0rn rootkit. thats one.

most of the bad news for linux generally involves either unknown exploits or 
possibly poorly patched systems.

>
> Have I been sleeping through something here?
not really. truth be told, we can afford a little nap time. 

I have, though found 200 virii, trojans and others on the samba enabled 
partitions located elsewhere in my lan (mostly in the "temporary internet 
folders" dirs of the affected windows machines. saved a lot of grief and a 
lot of other consternation with such things.....