linux virus protection
 

how does one manage virus protection on Mandrake?

search the forum, this has been answered many times.

Virus protection?!?!?

What is that?!?!?

Oh,... viruses... those things that run in Windoze... Oh,... silly newbies...

Seriously, there are something like 20 viruses in the wild for Linux... and none of them have been able to propogate in the wild. Most Linux viruses are proof of concept viruses... and have never made it outside of the lab.

A more serious threat is hackers actually trying to crack into your machine... intentionally, targeting you specifically, and intending to cause mallace.

Good firewalling helps that situation.

come on. i'm a linux virgin. hardly been groped by the pinquine. but how can there not be linux viruses? i virus is a program that intentionally crashes a system, right? people can't write code to flood the memery in a never ending loop? here, ill write psudocode for one.

main()
{
x = 1;
while(x > 0)
{
memory.location(x) = x;
x++;
}
}

that certianly doesnt propigate on its own, it doesnt cause any perminent damage, you would need to execute that on your own or execute a program that does, be compromised and have someone execute that on your system, and all of that would do little else than cause a race condition that would effectively freeze you, nothing more.

that block of code on it's own is harmless. but putting it in a file that copies itself to an important file when extracted, like one that is initialized at bootup would cause havac. it would stop you from booting cause you'd freeze, like you said, every time. i don't believer there aren't linux viruses.

noone ever said that the're aren't any linux viruses, and if they did they are misinformed. There are very few full fledged linux 'viruses' and none of them are in the wild right now.

"that block of code on it's own is harmless. but putting it in a file that copies itself to an important file when extracted, like one that is initialized at bootup would cause havac."

which is why everyone hammers on not running as root for normal every day tasks. there are no "important" system files in your home directory, which is all the virus would have access to.