FW: [PLUG] Microsoft to kill popular Linux antivirus product (fwd)

[Linux.Administrator at odot.state.or.us]

While it's true that a script to wipe out the user's home directory would be
trivial, my original question about being root to actually do any damage was
focusing on things like the kernel and root file system. Neither of these
would be impacted by a simple script unless it ran as root. 

BTW, Cooper's response was extremely informative. Thank you!

Dave

-----Original Message-----
From: m at pdxlug.org [mailto:m at pdxlug.org] 
Sent: Thursday, June 12, 2003 10:28 AM
To: plug at lists.pdxlinux.org
Subject: Re: FW: [PLUG] Microsoft to kill popular Linux antivirus product
(fwd)


> Can anyone tell me of a virus that will actually do anything to Linux?
> Sure,
> you can pass the "Outlook virus du jour" to your clients if you're running
> a server, but what virus can actually do damage on a Linux client without
> becoming root first? I've never understood that one.

Since when do viruses need root to spread?  And wouldn't a user be rather
annoyed if that non-root virus wiped out all the files in their home
directory?  Then we have things like Lindows where the user runs as root
all the time (for ease of use).  Eventually Linux GUI email clients will
allow you to simply click the attachment to open it (for ease of use). 
And if it was an RPM file attached, for example, and the email client
refused to do anything with it, then we still have user-training issues
like, "Oh, hey, that's an RPM file, I remember Bob from PLUG told me that
I just have to switch to root and run 'rpm -i badfile.rpm' to install it. 
Cool.  This Linux stuff isn't so hard."
~M


_______________________________________________
PLUG mailing list
PLUG at lists.pdxlinux.org
http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug