virus?

Lets take a look at the Love Bug virus. It was attached to email and when you clicked on it the operating system automatically ran it because of the extension. Unix is not like that. When you download a program or email document, it does not run the program based on an extension. You must first make the file executable. You must chmod the file before running it. Hopefully you have looked at the file and know what it does. And you are not root. Of couse, Unix can have trojan horses.

My guess is that we will see viruses on UNIX/Linux someday--as it makes it's way into the home.

In general, the average unix user does not have the priviledges to do any harm to the OS. One simply cannot log in an wipe the disk. So a virus would only be likely to harm the user's account.

With Windows the users, and any body sending a clever email, has the keys to the store (i.e. full access). This is not as true of NT. MS Visual Basic can be used to do anything you could do at thekeyboard. This includes deleting or renaming files.

As unix/linux gets to more mainstream desktops, tools used to script will be targets for attack. But again Joe User can't easily do much harm, unless there is a security hole.

Another view is that we here about attacks on the windows platform because ~90% of desktop users run it. And MS is a big target.

Bill.

There are several reasons for the lack of viruses on unix:
1. No large installed base with integrated components: Outlook/MS Office. The combinations make it extremely easy to propagate viruses.
2. Executables need to be re-compiled for each flavor/version of unix whereas DOS exe's will run on any windows machine
3. Process security: windows security is limited to user's, once a process is running it has full control over the file-system, and is able to perform damaging operations withimpunity. unix processes have the security level of the user that started them.
4. users tend to be more sophisticated, and aware of security issues.

It is absolutely harder for a virus to make its way into damaging a unix based machine (be it Linux, Solaris, BSD, AIX, etc.) thanks to the security scheme that is implemented under this OS. It is true that damage will be limited to the files or programs to which that user has rights to. However, some applications require "write" privileges for all users on certain files. in this case, if those files get affected, the whole application may malfunction or become non-operational. There is also the group permissions, which will let a user modify/erase certain files even if he/she is not the owner. Another oint to mention is that if the user running the infected program AKA virus, has root privileges inhereted throiugh the groups file, OS files might be compromised also.

Remember that many Web sites run on unix machines (and this includes mail servers). This means that viruses have passed through them, but they didn't make any damage because they didn't RUN on them.

When Linux starts occupying more desk

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