[vox] Linux viruses?

[Micah J. Cowan]

On Mon, Jun 14, 2004 at 11:44:07AM -0700, ME wrote:
> Micah J. Cowan said:
> > 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.
> 
> Risks for such a limited virus to propagate are even smaller, since the
> scope of users who use Linux and wine and would check their mail and/or
> swap files from wine are likely to be even smaller than the percent of the
> market which uses Linux without wine.

Heartily agreed.

> 
> One of the reasons MacOS 9 (an earlier) viruses did not spread to such
> extremes as the present viruses in windows was due to percent of the
> market who had and used Mac OS. Additionally, the creation of e-mail
> clients which permitted e-mail messages to automagically run code on
> recipients' machines compounded the issue making it possible for worm-like
> activity from various forms of malware.

I have also felt that the very low market-share of Mac OS (in
comparison to Winblows) simply kept the attention of virus-writers off
of it. Also, IIRC (which I may not), the stack on at least the older
Macs runs in the /reverse/ of Windows and typical Unix OSses, so that
buffer overruns tend to be far less fruitful, as the return pointer
resided /behind/ local variables on the stack, in the opposite
direction that string access and the like would take place. But I'm
not sure of this.

-- 
Micah J. Cowan
micah at cowan.name