On Mon, 13 Aug 2001, david higgins wrote:
> I know I'm inviting you all to bombard me with prions, but surely the main
> reason there aren't more Linux and MacOS viruses is because most people
> *only* use Windows? Why write a virus that is *only* limited to a small
> audience?
Linux systems (and Win2K, too, plus many others) have a concept of
"users" and "permissions" - basically, what you can use/change/delete etc
depends upon the user you log in as. There's a user such as "root" or
"Administrator" who can do everything, and the accepted practice is to log
in as this user to perform tasks such as installing programs, adding new
hardware drivers and creating new users. To do *your* stuff, like reading
email and editing documents, you log in as a user with less power.
This means that when you run an email virus on such a system, it's a lot
harder for it to screw up your system. Not quite as gratifying for the
sadist that wrote it..
-- Andrew Francis locust@iinet.net.au
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.1 : Fri Aug 31 2001 - 03:10:04 EST