mail viruses

[Thomas Stivers]

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On 03/05/04  4:37 PM -0500, Leslie Fairall wrote:
> I realize you can get viruses in Linux, but is it as big of a risk like
> Windows? What types of viruses can you get, and how would they affect
> your Linux system. Thanks.

While there may be some linux viruses out there somewhere they would not
be able to do as much damage as viruses in windows because linux does
not give normal users permission to tamper with anything but their own
files. So if you are doing most things as a normal user the worst that
can happen is that your home directory gets wiped out. This would
certainly be unpleasant, but the entire system would not be compromised.
If you are doing normal operations as root then IMHO you deserve
whatever you get.

The biggest problem I have on my linux boxes is that they get cluttered
up with all these viruses and spam messages, but they can't do any
damage.

But don't get over confident, this doesn't mean that linux doesn't have
any security vulnerabilities. There are various programs that from time
to time have security exploits such as bufer overflows (where bad data
can be designed to fill up the allotted space for it in memory and if
the program doesn't handle this the right way then the bad data can
overwrite other parts of memory and even get itself executed. If you
keep up with security updates from your linux distribution you can keep
your linux box pretty safe from these problems.

- -- 
Clarke's Corollary:
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
Thomas Stivers	e-mail: stivers_t at tomass.dyndns.org
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