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.
