on Fri, Jun 22, 2001 at 09:18:51AM +0100, Vanisa Surapipith scribbled:
Can virus attact a linux system? People with MSWindows are constantly affected and need to update their Norton or McAfee virus scanner. Is there a similar thing in linux world?
Yes. http://www.big.net.au/~silvio/ However initial infection can be harder because of the multiuser nature of gnu/linux (and peer review). Worms are far more common. http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,5080656,00.html http://www.computeruser.com/news/01/01/23/news13.html
If you have a high amount of bandwidth, or your isp provides a service such as cable, you are likely to get scanned (I do atleast once every two days or so) whether the scan is for open netbios shares or the latest s'kiddie 0day.
If you do minimal as root, then you significantly reduce the affect of any infection. Avoiding inherently buggy programs is another useful thing (eg, wuftpd, pine, bind, vixie's cron, uw imap, qpopper, sendmail). Running minimal services exposed to the outside world is a must.
There are scanners, but an ids might be more useful if you're especially paranoid about such things (snort! rocks. http://www.snort.org/) although there is a tendancy for turning up false positives.