S72UZAW@TOWSONVX.BITNET (Jan C. Zawadzki) (12/14/90)
A couple of people have replied to my posting on UNIX and virus infections. Please re-read my posting. I clearly stated that it all belongs on PEOPLE. A security-minded admnistrator CAN keep the risk of an infection to minimum. I never said the viruses were not possible in a UNIX environment - they are, but the chances of anyone logging into your system and wrecking havoc are small, considerably smaller than in DOS. To write a UNIX virus you need a very high level of skill at picking the internals of UNIX, and that system IS harder to master than DOS. Granted, there is a number of ways of gaining the root privs. Most of them are well known, and the administrators who care to CAN protect their systems. Nothing is guaranteed to keep nasties off, but with some very basic precautions you can contain any infection. UNIX comes with a number of defaults, like umask, etc, that should really be changed. No one but root can mess with my files or directories, I and I should not be able to mess with anyone else's file space. If you keep people from writing to */bin directories, they will not be able to mess with publicly used utilities. Again, the system is there, I think. The people (and attitude) is not. UNIX is not "THE OS", but you can make it very safe. Jan