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Author Topic: Is Linux Immune To Virus's ?.  (Read 5539 times)

tickmike

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silversurfer44

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Re: Is Linux Immune To Virus's ?.
« Reply #1 on: April 20, 2012, 09:36:46 PM »

As the man says, no, Linux is not immune. But it is a lot less likely to become infected. One would have to allow the virus to infect the operating system unless one was daft enough to run using root permissions. As for passing a virus to other operating systems via email well that is quite possible. One has to be wary of that though.
Common sense is the key to keeping a clean machine. Nice read though tickmike. Thank you.
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burakkucat

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Re: Is Linux Immune To Virus's ?.
« Reply #2 on: April 20, 2012, 09:45:48 PM »

An interesting read. Thank you, Michael:)

New information?  :no:

I believe (but I could well be wrong): one virus, two or more virii:-\
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tickmike

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Re: Is Linux Immune To Virus's ?.
« Reply #3 on: April 20, 2012, 10:01:41 PM »

I agree it's old news but it was interesting read.
Does anyone check for 'root kits' ?, I see that 'rkhuter' is in 'Synaptic' package manager so I'm going to try it on a test machine. ;)
« Last Edit: April 20, 2012, 10:27:22 PM by tickmike »
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roseway

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Re: Is Linux Immune To Virus's ?.
« Reply #4 on: April 20, 2012, 10:47:38 PM »

Quote
I believe (but I could well be wrong): one virus, two or more virii

As the forum's official pedant, I must disabuse you of that grammatical horror. :graduate:

The english word 'virus' is of course derived from the same latin word, meaning 'poison'. There is no known instance in latin of its ever having a plural, and latin scholars are in some disagreement about whether it was a noun of the second or fourth declension. If it was second declension, the plural would have been 'viri' (with one i ) and if fourth declension the plural would have been 'virūs'. Or it might have been a word with no plural (e.g. a word like 'oxygen'). Nobody knows, but one thing is certain, and that is that the plural wasn't 'virii'.

In English, the plural is 'viruses'.
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burakkucat

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Re: Is Linux Immune To Virus's ?.
« Reply #5 on: April 21, 2012, 12:58:28 AM »

Quote
In English, the plural is 'viruses'.

 :clap:  I thought I could be wrong.  ;D
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roseway

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Re: Is Linux Immune To Virus's ?.
« Reply #6 on: April 21, 2012, 07:20:21 AM »

You'll be tested on it next week. ;D
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  Eric

GigabitEthernet

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Re: Is Linux Immune To Virus's ?.
« Reply #7 on: April 21, 2012, 09:55:14 AM »

As we're on the topic of grammar, "Virus's" is incorrect. The Virus's is not referring to ownership so it is written "Viruses" as Roseway mentioned. An apostrophe does not indicate a plural, an apostrophe shows if one or more letters is missing or it shows ownership.
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roseway

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Re: Is Linux Immune To Virus's ?.
« Reply #8 on: April 21, 2012, 10:35:18 AM »

Getting back to the subject (with apologies to tickmike :) ) I installed rkhunter on this Debian system, something I should have done long ago. Somewhat disturbingly it found a possible rootkit (Xzibit) but it turns out that this is a false positive and is a known bug in rkhunter.

But no system is totally immune from viruses and other types of intrusion, so this is another tool which I shall use regularly from now on.
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  Eric

tickmike

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Re: Is Linux Immune To Virus's ?.
« Reply #9 on: April 21, 2012, 10:59:30 AM »

You start by using  rkhunter -c in a terminal .
 I also got a false positive  :o it found it's own data base  :'(

As we're on the topic of grammar, "Virus's" is incorrect. The Virus's is not referring to ownership so it is written "Viruses" as Roseway mentioned. An apostrophe does not indicate a plural, an apostrophe shows if one or more letters is missing or it shows ownership.

No it means I do not know how to spell it and it stops the spell checker marking it up  ;D
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kitz

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Re: Is Linux Immune To Virus's ?.
« Reply #10 on: April 21, 2012, 08:38:25 PM »

I believe (but I could well be wrong): one virus, two or more virii:-\

I think that may be a sign of the times... most certainly in the late 90's early 00's virii was the buzz word and used a lot in certain areas of the computing industry.
I know for sure, it was still in regular use when I did a degree module in about 2002/2003 on the subject.  Since then, we've all been properly educated and viruses it is.  :D
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