full-disclosure - Re: January 15 is Personal Firewall Day, help the cause

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From: eballen1 at qwest.net (Bruce Ediger)
Subject: Re: January 15 is Personal Firewall Day, help
 the cause

On Fri, 16 Jan 2004, David F. Skoll wrote:

> Not running A/V software on a Linux box is no risk at all.  Even the
> McAffee A/V software wouldn't detect a worm in time to do any good.
> You can take the following simple precautions (which I do):  Mount /tmp
> noexec, and if you're really paranoid, mount /home noexec also.  That
> pretty much kills any propagation vector for viruses.

The commercial anti-virus people have never really addressed the
lack of in-the-wild viruses for the unixes in general, and linux
in particular.  Or, back in the day, why didn't VMS suffer from
a plague like DOS did and Windows does?

Not to beat a dead horse too hard, but maybe the small amount of
discretionary access controls (user, group, other, rwx) that typical
unix/linux installations have is enough to prevent viral epidemics?

Perhaps the greater "ecodiversity" of email clients, filesystem layouts,
mail transfer agents, HTTP severs and version variation of the above
provides enough resistance to avoid epidemics and pandemics.

Perhaps acknowledging that the big DOS and Windows virus problems were
boot sector, Word macro and Outlook viruses would help clarify the
situation.

Instead, we've got the "Linux isn't 100% immune so Linux users should
run anti-virus software, too" scaremongering that flies in the face
of observed reality.