Sam Cater wrote:
Viruses that work with Linux are exceptionally rare, and even then to do any serious damage they need the root user password.
On any single-user desktop machine, everything of any value is owned by that user. The fact that the malware will find it hard to install itself at a low level hidden from view is a useful consolation, but all the root-owned files that matter on my desktop are "backed-up" merely by the fact I can restore them from any Ubuntu 8.04 CD followed by an "apt-get upgrade". If I "only" lost the files that my user account has write access to, then I would be very upset and would be no worse off than facing a bare-metal re-install.
If I ran a "funny video" that arrived by email from a friend, and which showed something pretty, whilst emailing itself to everyone in by TBird address book and then deleting all the files accessible by my user, then I wouldn't be thinking I'd got off lightly. None of that is intrinsically impossible with Linux.
Maybe consumer distros like Ubuntu, when faced with a big hard disk to install on, should default to creating a large backup partition onto which /home is backed up regularly in the background (by root, so the backups can't be deleted by a user level program). Sure, allow it to be turned off, but as a default that would be very good in my view, and a better use of background CPU than search indexing or anti-virus scanning.