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Information Technology News Being a good netizen – protecting Linux from network nasties
Information Technology News Being a good netizen – protecting Linux from network nasties | Being a good netizen – protecting Linux from network nasties |
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| by David M Williams | |
| Thursday, 01 November 2007 | |
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Instead, a list of known Linux malware – albeit very small – can be found on Wikipedia. And, while not a virus, the Morris worm infected about 6,000 major UNIX machines as have other notable worms. Before we go on, let’s dispel another myth. It is commonly alleged that Windows has more viruses and vulnerabilities than Linux (or even MacOS) software due to the massive market size Windows has; more people are focusing on uncovering vulnerabilities, and more people are affected by a virus outbreak so there is a higher reward for malicious persons to work on infecting these systems. While there is an element of truth, consider that Apache is the most-used web server in the world, but yet it does not have any reputation for being especially bug-ridden or insecure, moreso than any other application. You’d reasonably expect it to be a prized target if the story were true. The reality is Windows is naturally insecure for a variety of reasons, not least being Windows’ users were always conditioned to login and run programs as the administrator user. Windows Vista has made an attempt, too late, to stifle this behaviour but the far number of complaints about the intrusive UAC box is testament to how many ordinary, daily, Windows tasks require administrative privileges – not necessarily due to legitimate need, but often just bad programming. By contrast, Linux users are well accustomed to the notion of having an “ordinary” login, separate from root, with no special enhanced system rights or access. A good deal of the credit for Linux’ security and general virus-resilience is due to this natural, ingrained self-constrained behaviour. A case in point, the Linux virus “Vit” replicates itself under Linux operating systems and infects Linux executable files. When an infected file is run, the virus seizes control. It finds all the executable ELF files in the current directory and infects them, too. If this virus is executed as the root super-user then the entire system can be compromised and all executable files on that computer will ultimately be infected. Yet, most Linux users do not do this. Even if they invoke the virus, an ordinary user account will not generally hold many executable files apart from software being developed by the user themselves. And the user most definitely has no privileges to modify/write/delete critical system files. The virus will never be able to infect these when it has been loaded within a regular user account. But all this said, there is one very good reason for running anti-virus software on your Linux box. And this is what it is. |
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