Evening Rishi...;) On 2004.01.29 00:55 Rishi Gangoly wrote: [snip] I can assure you there are a multitude of them in forms of .... * Buffer Overflow Exploits * Various other Code Exploits and Privelege Escalation Exploits. Gnu/Linux and most other Open Operating systems have their fare share of security issues and ones that can be addressed in a very realistic fashion. Trevor -- ( >- -< ) /~\ __ Gnu/Linux, Its all about Choice __ /~\ | \) / trevor.w(a)pvision.biz \ (/ | |_|_ \ Need a consultant, Call 9820349221 / _|_| \____________________________________/

On Thu, 29 Jan 2004, Rishi Gangoly wrote: A virus also needs to infect other binaries with itself. If run as a regular user, the virus only has access to executables that are writable by the current user. To infect the entire system, the virus would have to be executed as root. If root executes the virus, I'd say you've given root to the wrong person. We need to contrast this with worms. Worms are capable of spreading without human intervention, and yes, there have been linux worms in the past. Typically, they would take advantage of well known holes in a system's network security (remember l10n attacking rpcd, bind and wuftpd) to gain access to that system. Once there, they'll install themselves to be always executed, and then search for other hosts to infect. The only human intervention required is that the system be left open for remote exploits like this. We should remember that the first great Internet Worm was actually cross platform. it worked on unix as well as vax systems. -- Computer programmers never die, they just get lost in the processing.