A few simple questions(...if you don't mind)

Giorgos Keramidas keramida at ceid.upatras.gr
Mon Jul 5 14:31:54 PDT 2004


On 2004-07-05 20:01, Phil Schulz <ph.schulz at gmx.de> wrote:
> Mark Jayson Alvarez wrote:
> >2. Do you know if viruses exist in freebsd, like in Windows?
>
> I believe there used to be some viri for Unix-like OSs, but they are all
> pretty much harmless since they aren't usually found 'in the wild'.
> A quick search on www.viruslibrary.com gave me one match [1] - maybe
> someone else can comment that.

A lot of the links of the Unix virus page fail with 404.  One that works
is, I'm afraid, hilarious in its lack of detail and vagueness.

  : Linux.Diesel
  :
  : This is a relatively harmless, non-memory resident parasitic
  : virus. It searches for Linux executable files in system directories
  : and subdirectories, then writes itself to the middle of the
  : file. Before searching files, the virus reads its code from the host
  : file. It moves the original bytes to the end of the file and
  : increases the size of the previous section.

Nobody said I'd give permission to anyone to write to my files.  How
would that ever happen?  I don't work as root, most of the time:

  : giorgos at gothmog:~$ ac -p
  :         sysop               24.27
  :         giorgos            221.31
  :         root                 0.00
  :         total              245.59
  : giorgos at gothmog:~$

The `sysop' user is exactly the same as `root' with GNU bash as the
login shell.  The `root' user still has tcsh(1) as usual, and has
obviously remained unused for months.

I don't see how a Linux virus like Linux.Diesel whose distribution and
infection methods are (carefully?) kept secret would be able to mess
with my files.

Remember, this is not Windows, where everything is free and you have to
share your personal data with the world :P

In short, I've heard of no viruses that affect BSDs during the last 7-8
years that I'm using a BSD Unix at home and work.

- Giorgos



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