I have a general linux question: Is the reason why linux is "inherantly immune" to viruses and worms due to a) the fact that linux is relatively uncommon, and therefore not a worthwhile target for viruses, or... b) something inherant to the way the OS works that makes it immune. your thoughts... PS - it seems wierd to me that hackers / virus authors would be able to penetrate a closed source OS easier than an open source one, yes yes? , Boober the #1 sTuNNa (jk)

Speaking of worms - as in can of, open ;) Linux is actually not actually all that uncommon. On personal computers? Yes. On Internet servers? No. You are, IMO, correct in thinking that Linux is a less attractive target for virus writers than Windows. This is not necessarily becuase there are more computers on the Internet running Windows than Linux (which there are). It is more because the percentage of computers running Windows that are misconfigured and vulnerable to exploit is much higher than that of computers running Linux. So virus writers attack the largest surface area possible - misconfigured comptuers running Windows. It is not exactly incorrect to say that Linux is inherently less vulnerable to viruses than Windows. It is however a bit misleading. A properly configured Windows computer is about as secure as a properly configured Linux computer. I say "about" because, all things being equal, Linux is architecturally more secure than Windows. You can get 95% of the way to Linux-like security on Windows though. The other 5% is debateable, and probably outside the scope of this discussion. Now in practice, Windows is dramatically less secure than Linux. There are a number of reasons for this. The primary ones are, IMO, the tight integration of applications with the operating system, inadequate memory protection, inadequate user/system privilege separation, and an almost total lack of best-practice operation in an overwhelming majority of Windows' install base. The first three reasons all sort of fall under the same general category - allowing too much untrusted code to run on the system. If the simple act of viewing a web page can actually run executable code locally, the task of securing against malicious code is much more difficult. The first three could be largely mitigated by adoption of the fourth - use of best practices. This is the "95%" I mentioned earlier. Most Windows users run as administrator - or "root" - all the time. This is bad, becuase the root user has privileges to make potentially catastrophic changes to the system. And most viruses, worms and spyware run (or at least attempt to run) in the context of the user. If that user has elevated privilges, so does the virus. If every Linux user in the world ran as root - and if Linux had things like ActiveX directly integrated into the operating system - you better believe we'd see more viruses on Linux platforms. Just my thoughts on the subject. A lot of which is probably open to debate. so please do :)

Ditto jimminy. FYI http://librenix.com/?inode=21

Interesting read 3Dave - thanks :)

Linux viruses are like a joke. It is very difficult to inject it having no access. !zilla-master

Interesting thought, zilla. Would you care to expand on it?