I stand corrected, Capt_Caveman.

The holdup with viruses is that Network Associates and Symantec have thus far been unsuccessful in getting one to propogate throughout the Internet, so there is so far no demand for Linux antivirus products on the desktop. I'm sure that once Symantec and Network Associates each figure out how to get viruses to propogate across inherently-secure operating systems like BSD and Linux, they will immediately announce their antivirus offerings. Now excuse me while I adjust my tinfoil hat!!

Seriously though, there are a handful of Linux viruses, but they have a heck of a hard time propogating. There are a lot of trojan horses though (which is what Capt_Caveman is referring to) but they're not viruses because they generally can't propogate without the user actually installing it. In those cases rkhunter and other free rootkit detection scripts will suffice in keeping your system squeaky-clean!

Just did my end-of-day scan, and still clean as a whistle. Gotta love linux!

Not to mention that when you really think about it what do you bet most hackers are using? Something they know that can fail or something more secure. I know that if I was a hacker I would use Linux not Windows.

I wouldn't really consider it a trojan (definitely not in the rootkit sense). It's an ELF-infector, so if you execute any file that it's managed to infect, it will infect every other executable file that it has access to in that portion in the filesystem, so you can imagine the effect it can have if run as root. I tend to make the distinction between the two in that Trojans aren't usually replicating like that (you'd literally need to do 'cp bad_file good_file' to infect another file. Every AV site I've seen lists it as a virus rather than a trojan as well. Of course the distinction between the two is often a grey area, so it's often a matter of Symantecs (Ohh, I crack myself up ).