regularly scheduled paranoia. Was: Re: Anti Virus

[der.hans]

Am 07. Mar, 2002 schwätzte foodog so:

> I think the days of not worrying about virus scanning on Linux are
> numbered.  In the early days pirates were largely responsible for
> viruses spreading under DOS.  Eventually viruses started to "get lucky"
> and make it into official software releases.

OK, I agree that it's quite possible for software to be compromised at
the source ( see apache and ftp projects that got hit ). I also agree
that compromised software could make it into distributions or into
man-in-the-middle attacks and onto computers.

Admittedly I was thinking of the stupid ways that m$ allows and encourages
the spread of viruses by having a shoddy system and that my mail clients,
web browsers, etc. won't have those *features*. I will continue to not worry
about such viruses.

*NIX isn't free of security concerns and problems. Today's OpenSSH alert is
a good example ( it's disappointing that debian and RedHat haven't posted
anything to their websites today, but SuSE already had new packages when I
found out about it this morning ).

ciao,

der.hans
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