http://www.breitbart.com/article.php...show_article=1

I just read the above article. Someone in Communist China has found a way to create a virus in the Android operating system. Android is a Linux fork.

It looks as though the virus is quite specific: it only works on certain apps downloaded from Communist China. I'm hoping that the Google Android version of Linux is different enough from the standard Linux it was "forked" off of that it will be of no concern to we desktop Linux users.

Does this mean that we Linux users must begin running anti-virus software as a continuous process now? What is the chance standard distros will be affected?

Don't go to China and buy this stuff. Case closed.

A very large percentage of phone firmware is Linux-based. That does not mean that one exploit will work on everything that is Linux-based.

Even Android phone (or tablet) owners need not worry about this. If they get their software only from trusted repositories, they'll be better off.

IMO, there is little chance of this affecting other distributions. Whenever malcode is injected into a distro's repository (Debian, for instance), the issue only affects that distro (why would such an issue affect other distributions?). It would be different if the 'virus' actually took advantage of a known vulnerability. This 'virus' appears to be relying on the ignorance of the typical phone user.

It isn't an issue, IMO....certainly not enough to start considering a Linux AV solution as a standard software install.

Well, Android has much more of a possibility to harbor malware as it is much more popular. It also has a different API/ABI than standard Linux (thanks to Java) so viruses on Android aren't likely to affect standard Linux in any way (okay, maybe NDK viruses but not SDK viruses).

*nix is and has never been immune to things like this .Rootkits have been around for a long time
THIS kind of thing is WHY repos are singed and the rpm's , deb's , or xz's are singed and that source tarballs have a signature to check against .

1) No operating system is completely safe from malicous code.
2) This exploit is made possible by people willing downloading and executing a piece of code from a 3rd party app provider, so it's not like it's some systemic problem with the Android OS. It's just bad decision making practices on behalf of the user.

I'm really baffled as to how this one specific issue changes any sort of game that might exist. As stated there have been vulnerabilities in linux software for aaaaaaages, why is this one example interesting?