[vox] Linux viruses?

[Micah J. Cowan]

On Sun, Jun 13, 2004 at 12:14:30PM -0700, ME wrote:
> Marianne Waage said:
> > Bill Kendrick said:
> >>Noticed this article on my newsticker just now:
> >> Antivirus vendors await first Linux worm
> >> http://www.infomaticsonline.co.uk/News/1155836
> >>However, one line in the article piqued my curiosity:
> >> Symantec reported that it has found three Linux viruses in the wild
> >> since the start of 2004.
> >>Anyone have any references to these three?
> >
> > I always wondered what would happen if you got a virus through something
> > emulated like Outlook under wine. There was some other program that let
> > you run MS products under linux but I don't recall the name now.
> 
> For the most part, viruses are not only architecture specific but also
> perating System specific. In cases where a "virus" (or worm) is able to
> hist more than one architecture, the virus (or worm) generally has two
> parts (executable code for each architecture) while in cases where the
> same architecture is the target but with different OS, the few viruses (or
> worms) which do this *usually* have each space separate. However, there
> was one (a year or so back?) which came out which attacked two OS and even
> though is had code separate for different OS, a large part of the malware
> was shared between both parts.
> 
> For the most part, a virus infecting files in an instance of wine or
> vmware may infect files accessible from the windows session, but is
> unlikely to infect files which are used in the Linux space. Certainly,
> they could infect your windows files and harm them much like a windows
> machine that was not being emulated would find.

Actually, I read Marianne's message to mean a Linux-targeting virus
that takes advantage of vulnerabilities in Microsoft products being
emulated on the machine.

-- 
Micah J. Cowan
micah at cowan.name