Anti Virus, now Anti Spy-ware

[Nils Kassube]

Steve Lamb wrote:
>     I see this argument all the time and know what I say?  Hogwash.  It
> completely ignores Linux's unix roots and the security implications
> that means.  Look at one of the most talked about dialogs here; sudo. 
> For this malware to get complete control of the system the user has to
> actively participate in its installation.  Without that one piece the
> software is relegated to a single user's login and is trivial to
> remove. This is not true for the vast majority of Windows installs.

While I don't generally disagree with this argument, I think on a 
workstation it could be a big problem already if the malware would "only" 
access the user area. A malicious program could be accidentally installed 
by the user and run at login with the user's privileges. It couldn't take 
over the entire system, but that doesn't mean it can't do some damage. It 
wouldn't be a great problem to reinstall the OS within a reasonable time. 
But if a malicious program only modifies my personal files it would 
probably take some time until I notice. Then I can only hope that I still 
have a backup of the files from before the malicious program was somehow 
installed.


Nils