Antivirus

[Bart Silverstrim]

Ed Greshko wrote:
> Jonathan Dlouhy wrote:
>> 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.

Can you describe what these virus emails were that you'd have wanted to 
forward them to someone you knew?

All the ones I had run across were from suspicious senders, with 
attachments that had suspect names to them (.jpg.exe?), and the text 
with them were just generic and ill-spelled and out of character for the 
sender, if the sender was even a (spoofed) name I knew.

The only ones even remotely legit were zip files, and then it had the 
password in the email from people I knew weren't tech-savvy enough to 
use Zip, let alone to zip with a password, and then it's just plain 
stupid to send an encrypted file to someone with the password in plaintext.

I for a couple years just blocked all executable files from our mail 
server and never had to worry about it again. The only things that could 
come through were links to viruses (thanks MS for including your HTML 
renderer and the ensuing vulnerabilities for IE in OE and Outlook...)

Just curious what you were seeing that you'd have passed it on if not 
for your AV.