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Crossplatform virus - the latest proof of concept

Crossplatform virus - the latest proof of concept

Posted Apr 9, 2006 16:44 UTC (Sun) by Sombrio (guest, #26942)
Parent article: Crossplatform virus - the latest proof of concept

It's about time that Linux became main stream enough that people will finally start writing viruses for it. :) I guess I will have to start paying more attention to Hurd.


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Crossplatform virus - the latest proof of concept

Posted Apr 9, 2006 20:41 UTC (Sun) by hazelsct (guest, #3659) [Link]

Indeed, or FreeBSD. Debian can work with all three.

Not to mention GNOME/KDE/XFce/GNUStep, Firefox/Konqueror/Epiphany, Thunderbird/KMail/Evolution, .deb/.rpm, etc. There's no monoculture in "Linux" (except arguably glibc across Debian), so no single attack vector will work everywhere. We have security by diversity.

Interesting that they can get a single file to run on both Win32 and GNU/Linux, but not very important.

Crossplatform virus - the latest proof of concept

Posted Apr 10, 2006 9:40 UTC (Mon) by anLWNreader (guest, #36915) [Link]

It will run fine on BSD and GNU too, so no point in switching.

Crossplatform virus - can't touch non-x86

Posted Apr 11, 2006 19:35 UTC (Tue) by hazelsct (guest, #3659) [Link]

Okay, then switch to PowerPC, Alpha, or any of the other 8 Debian platforms, where *zero* of the x86 ELF binaries and buffer overflow exploits will run. Honeypots running Linux on Sparc with multiple known vulnerabilities have had years of uncompromised uptime.

Again, security in diversity. No proprietary alternative comes anywhere near us.

Crossplatform virus - the latest proof of concept

Posted Apr 10, 2006 15:09 UTC (Mon) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

Now, how difficult would it be to write a portable file infector for #! scripts?

Crossplatform virus - the latest proof of concept

Posted Apr 10, 2006 20:33 UTC (Mon) by micampe (guest, #4384) [Link]

Do you think a Python script could suffice?

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