Viruses

[ahaziah77]

So since i have installed linux, I have been ready about how virus are not nearly as likely to infect linux system as windows, i am running a dual-boot though and import my profile and have a lot of my files from windows system on linux, can they potentially be infected in the windows sense?

[oz]

You can check this short article to help you in deciding what security apps you might want to run, if any:

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/sec...-security.html

[Draciron]

All viruses except a proof of concept virus written about a decade ago are OS specific. A windows virus cannot infect your Linux system, but it can infect files such as Microsoft Office documents. The virus code will be dormant or break when run in Open office under Linux but will not be removed unless you do so manually. You can copy infected files to your Linux partitions without fear but if those same files are copied to a windows machine and run they will infect that windows machine. Boot sector viruses load before the OS and many will happily run no matter what OS is loaded up next because they replace BIOS code and live on the system level. These are rather rare today however. It takes skilled assembly programming to write them and the ease of infecting Microsoft software makes such skill unnecessary. The space limitations is another problem with boot sector viruses. Mostly they reproduce and that is about it. Maybe draw an ambulance driving across the screen or something. If you are in a highly secure environment then you might worry about custom crafted boot sector viruses specifically targeting your network. Other than that you have little to fear from them.

There are good Linux virus scanners. It is actually wise in a dual boot environment to do virus scans from Linux. Many modern viruses will actually take over scanner software and thus prevent detection by the virus scanner.

There is a Microsoft inspired myth running around that people don't target Linux systems. This is not true. Linux systems are considered an accomplishment to hack. Hackers have a vast arsenal of tools to hack other systems if they can compromise a Linux system. As such they are prized targets and heavily targeted. Just leave SSH open outside the firewall and watch your logs for attacks and you'll see just how heavily Linux systems can be targeted.

Linux isn't virus proof but it is 100 times more difficult to write a virus for Linux. The only ones I know that exist are boot sector infecters which means you have to put an infected disk/flash drive in your machine to get infected. The way they work is they launch BEFORE Linux loads and attack the system before it can protect itself.

There have been a few worms that affect Linux or primarily Linux machines. Most worms seen on Linux have been not really Linux specific but specific to apps like sendmail or Apache which are commonly run on Linux machines. The other potential threat was one Open Office virus which infected systems of any OS using Open Office.

Linux is much harder to write a virus for because by design it is far more secure. When you start up Apache on a Linux machine it usually runs as the user Apache which cannot even log in. So normally if there is a security flaw in Apache the worst the hacker can do is crash Apache. Even if they trick you into running bad software as a user you do not have write permissions to /etc or /usr so you cannot replace system libs with infected libs. The default path does not include your home dir or the current dir. So they can't even pretend to be a system file. They have to crack the root account to do real damage to a Linux system. Linux has much better memory segregation as well. This makes buffer overflows and similar software less lethal if they are run by an account other than root.

So since i have installed linux, I have been ready about how virus are not nearly as likely to infect linux system as windows, i am running a dual-boot though and import my profile and have a lot of my files from windows system on linux, can they potentially be infected in the windows sense?