Antivirus

[Leonard Chatagnier]

--- Jonathan Dlouhy <dlouhy at charter.net> wrote:


---------------------------------
  Good point. Thanks for mentioning it. Slightly off
the topic, Ihave never ceased to be amazed at the
attitude some Windows users seemto have. I think it's 

Ed Greshko wrote:  
Jonathan Dlouhy wrote:  
 <snip>     
Ed, have you ever run across a virus? In fact I'd be
interested to hear if anyone has ever had a virus in
Linux. I've run Linux for about 15 years and can't say
I've ever had a virus. I've got a Mac with OS X and
have never had a virus with it either. Windows?
Completely different story...    
    
I have never run across a virus whose target was
Linux.  I have gotten emails containing virus whose
targets were windows and, like I said, my anti-virus
caught those and killed them.  Had I not been running
an anti-virus I could have passed it on in the
attachment and been part of the problem...not the
solution.So, even though the chances of seeing a virus
with a Linux target it is the neighborly thing to do
to run anti-virus to protect those less fortunate than
oneself.  

Clamav has detected viruses on my Ubuntu OS spread
throughout the HDD.  I can't say it was a windows
virus or not.  At least one was not associated with an
email and one I just clicked an .exe attachment to see
what would happen.  IIRC, they were some kind or mm32
Trojan. No telling how long they were on the linux
HDD.  I could not detect any damage of any kind. 
Clamav detected the Trojans the first time I ran it
and quarantined them.  I wasn't too concerned about
them causing any problems on linux as I'd pretty much
already heard that viruses couldn't execute on the
linux OS but it seems you sure can get them in all the
usual ways.  Sorry, can't quote a link, but have
seen/read that there are some linux specific viruses
out there in the world.  So, I run clamav from time to
time just to see what might have contaminated my OS.
It's only rarely that an up-to-date clamav will find
any thing on the HDD. All my email viruses are found
in spam mail usually isolated in my Yahoo email Bulk
folder. 

Leonard Chatagnier
lenc5570 at sbcglobal.net