Grisoft Predicts Linux Virus Plague
Guy Fraser
guy at incentre.net
Thu Oct 13 16:43:48 UTC 2005
On Thu, 2005-13-10 at 11:49 -0400, taharka wrote:
> Read all about it at:
>
> http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2143697/grisoft-warns-linux-virus
>
> taharka
>
> Lexington, Kentucky U.S.A.
>From this quote :
"Grisoft is one of the first mainstream antivirus vendors to have
started a whole new division dedicated to Linux protection."
What do expect the guy to say, he is marketing his product.
I am not saying that it is not possible to get a virus on a linux
system, but linux has had a fairly large audience for over 10
years, and their have only been a handful of virus and worm
variants that have been found. On the other hand it is always
better to be safe than sorry.
Other than just being pests, virus and worm variants are normally
used to create a proxy to collect information, send spam or covertly
redirect traffic from banned sites so they can be accessed. Virus
and worm activity usually cause increased traffic consumption and
since that costs money, people are usually willing to fix their
systems.
As a Privacy and Security administrator at an ISP, I often discover
customers who have been infected. In most cases once a customer has
been told what has happened and how to take measures to protect
their systems, they take appropriate actions and stay safe. In
the last few years I have seen many residential customers and most
companies install hardware firewalls on high speed connections, and
most dial-up users have anti virus/spy-ware/spam and firewall programs
on their computers. We also provide spam and virus filtering through
our mail system which helps. We are finally seeing a drop in virus
and worm activity, compared to the surging rise a couple years ago.
Education, Awareness and Proactive measures are the best tools to quell
the scourge.
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