Forget viruses.. think malware.

Posted Apr 13, 2006 19:15 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97)
Parent article: Fear of a Linux virus

Ok everytime that this brought up there is a lot of people saying it wont happen, wont be a problem, etc. The major thing that virus software stops these days is malware packages (worms, spyware, keystroke loggers etc). Mass viruses are not the major vector these days.. targeted malware is what we see coming it in.. it comes in for linux, windows, macosx and god knows what else.

The largest groups that I find affected by this are Linux and MacosX people who some-how seem to have bought the "we are immune to viruses". Sure you didnt get a virus that was trying to send out 2 billion versions of yourself. But you did end up with a nice keystroke logger, a spam relay, and a P2P child porn relay.

Linux users do not have magical powers against social engineering. On some internal auditing.. we found that the Linux people were as likely to follow the nude AnnaK emails as the Windows people (even the Unix admins who had been doing this for 20+ years). We found more Linux desktops with broken versions of Firefox than we did Windows because admins thought they were immune to anything..

Forget viruses.. think malware.

Posted Apr 14, 2006 15:50 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]

Mass viruses are not the major vector these days.. targeted malware is what we see coming it in..

Targetted how? I assume targetted means the sender chooses the recipient intelligently, whereas mass virus means the sender chooses the recipient indiscriminately.