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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