Steven Shelikoff wrote:


It's one reason, but not the only reason. The main reason is a
difference in philosophy in what to do about the security holes. In the
linux/unix world, when a hole is found that a virus can exploit, it's
plugged with a patch to close the hole. That way, no more viruses can
take advantage of it. That this is usually done before a virus even
exists to exploit the hole is a result of a) it being not as popular to
attack as MS and b) that linux is opensource so anyone can examine the
source code to easily find holes before a hacker finds it by hours and
hours of messing around. If it were more popular, there may be more of
a chance that a virus would exploit the hole before it's closed. But
once the hole is closed, no more viruses can take advantage of it and
there's no need for antivirus software.

On the other hand, with MS software there are many known holes that a
virus can exploit. They are there by design and never closed. That's
why you get virus after virus afer virus, all slightly different, that
use the same exploit. And that's why you have to keep updating your
antivirus software to handle 10's of thousands of different viruses, new
ones all the time. And that's why it's so easy to write a virus.
Because the hard part is finding the hole, and once it's known, all you
have to do is copy someone else's virus but make it slightly different
so it'll get past the antivirus software. The fact that linux/unix
closes the hole when it's found makes it much more difficult to hack
than MS.

When you look at the security bulletins that come out about holes in
Linux, 99% of them are not even something that a virus could ever take
advantage of. They almost always have something to do with allowing a
user of the system (someone who already has an account and can freely
execute programs on a system) to run malicious code that either gives
them superuser priveledge, hangs the system, etc. That kind of hole is
not an issue for most people's desktop systems where they are the only
user.

Steve

----(Applause!!!!)--- I didn't want to continue the "rant", but I couldn't
have explained it any better.
--
_______m___õ¿~___m_________________________