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DefinitionsDefinitionsPosted Feb 20, 2003 20:17 UTC (Thu) by Ross (subscriber, #4065)Parent article: Lindows sells virus protection Hmm... the fetchmail issue you describe sounds more like a worm to me. A virus is a code fragment that inserts itself into other programs. When those programs are executed they in turn infect other programs. The fragment may also do something destructive like delete files or crash the system. A virus may also insert itself into startup code like the master boot record. Viruses are actually pretty rare these days, even on Windows. Linux doesn't have much of a problem with them because users aren't allowed to write to the system directories. The virus scanner people tend to call all harmful programs "viruses". Most of them are actually trojan horses or worms these days.
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Definitions - oops, forgot one thing Posted Feb 20, 2003 20:19 UTC (Thu) by Ross (subscriber, #4065) [Link] Except Linux users who do everything as root are susceptable to viruses when they run software they obtain through non-trusted channels (downloaded from random pages or from friends).And Linux distributions (Lindows) which force everything to run as root are just asking for trouble. The distribution will let the user write to any file, and these users are probably not experienced enough to know what programs to trust and which not to trust. It won't take any fetchmail bugs to allow viruses to spread on Lindows.
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