HOWTO: On-access virus scanning on FC5

Bruno Wolff III bruno at wolff.to
Wed Apr 12 15:19:30 UTC 2006


On Wed, Apr 12, 2006 at 10:56:10 -0400,
  taharka <res00vl8 at alltel.net> wrote:
> 
> Based on the following, this may change PDQ :-((

No it won't. One of the reasons viruses on Windows are so prevalent is that
Windows makes it easy to execute foreign code. There is a lot of resistance
against doing this in the free software world. When a data viewing program
is too powerful, this is usually considered a bug and gets fixed.

There can still be exploitable bugs in key applications (mainly web browsers
and mail clients), but at least by design these applications are supposed to
be safe.

Down the road SELinux in strict mode will also help against attacks that
trick people into running malicious code, but not letting random code do
anything the user could do at say a shell prompt.




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