[pchelpers] News:Kaspersky Labs' slated for Linux virus FUD

Linux boffins say it doesn’t work and help to make it work

By Nick Farrell: Wednesday 19 April 2006, 07:58
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LINUX EXPERTS are dismissing as FUD a claim by Russian Anti-Virus outfit 
Kaspersky labs that it has invented a cross platform virus that can eat 
Windows and Linux systems.

The story was broken in Computerworld, here, and the source code was 
posted here, so people in the know could have a dekko.

It all made a damn fine headline, but when the Linux people sat down 
with it they found it didn't actually work on kernels later than 2.6.16.

The people at newsforge said that it remained to be seen whether malware 
authors could create a virus that can spread as easily on Linux as 
viruses on Windows. Besides it could all be stopped if Linux users 
refused to "run as root".

Linus Torvalds on the other hand was intrigued by the virus. He sat had 
to sit down and wrote a patch so that the virus worked on the latest 
kernel and he could play with it.

Torvalds was interested in the virus, not because it was spreadable and 
could cause the end of the operating system as we know it, but because 
it was a regular program which happens to work on both Windows and 
Linux, and that happens to do things like writing to files that are 
owned by the user. In the end he said the reason that the virus is not 
propagating itself in the latest kernel versions is due to a bug in how 
GCC handles specific registers in a particular system call. He has coded 
a patch for the kernel to allow the virus to work on even the Linux kernel.

In other words the reason the virus did not spread on Linux was because 
of a flaw, which Torvalds has fixed and now everyone is excited.

If Kaspersky wanted everyone in the Linux community to download its 
Virus checkers because they were frightened of viruses it seems to have 
miscalculated that a tad.

Sourced from:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=31092

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