Good anti-virus programs for Linux

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers,,,781-647-1813)]

Jerry Feldman writes:

	... Unix and Linux may require a bit more
	sophistication than a Windoz or Mac virus, but they do exist, and we shall
	be seeing more of them as people start running Linux on their desktops.


Indeed.  One of the standard explanations of why DOS/Windoze have had
so  many  infections  is that they constitute a "monoculture" of many
machines running the same basic software on the  same  hardware  with
the same binary format, and so on.  Unix has run on lots of different
kinds of hardware, and even on one kind, there are different  flavors
of Unix with different libraries and incompatible executables.  Since
most virii (excepting the macro type) work at the machine-code level,
it's  easy  for them to spread between like systems, but difficult if
there are even small "species" differences between hosts.

The growing popularity of linux on PC hardware is starting to produce
a  monoculture,  and  we  can  expect  the  virus developers to start
finding it  attractive.   Linux's  security  is  a  lot  better  than
Microsoft's,  but  this mainly means that virus developers will learn
on Windoze, and then graduate to linux when they are ready for a real
challenge.

Of course, those running linux on an Alpha  or  SPARC  or  any  other
non-Intel hardware probably don't need to worry for a while.

An are of worry is that the linux, FreeBSD  and  NetBSD  crowds  have
been working on binary compatibility.  This will make it possible for
linux viruses to affect those other systems.  Maybe this bears a  bit
of  thought.   If  you only exchange code in source form, things like
viruses, worms and Trojan horses are a lot more difficult.

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