Hello,
I just join ALUG and have a newly installed Red Hat 7.1 on my PC. I hope to explore it fully but there comes a concern on virus.
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?
Cheers, Vanisa.
&------------------------------------------------------------------------& Ms Vanisa Surapipith (Research Postgraduate) School of Environmental Sciences University of East Anglia, Norwich, Norfolk /_____T NR4 7TJ, United Kingdom. (x)/(x) ~~~~~~~~
On Fri, 22 Jun 2001, Vanisa Surapipith wrote:
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?
Kind of there are various types of evil program around and they vary from virus to trojan etc. etc. the best things you can do is visit the Redhat updates page which is here and make sure you keep you system updated with the latest patches and security fixes. http://www.redhat.com/support/errata/rh71-errata.html There may also be a mailing list on Redhats site to inform you when security updates are released but I can't find it as my net connection is running very slow atm.
and if you want to learn a bit more about security you can go here http://www.deter.com/unix/ and here http://www.securityfocus.com/ (and follow the basics link)
Basically if you are running Linux you are far less likely to get a virus on your computer due to the way the system works (basically the mail client doesnt hook directly into the operating system) but you are more likely to get hacked and possibly have a trojan (a hidden program allowing the hacker back into your computer) put onto your machine.
This of course will be covered in the FAQ which 0.1 is coming RSN (possibly even by Monday)
Adam
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.
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Adam Bower -
Vanisa Surapipith -
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