Why GNU/Linux Viruses Are Fairly Uncommon
1–10 of 117 posts
Re: Why GNU/Linux Viruses Are Fairly Uncommon
#2It's a joke, not analysis. Was hoping for the latter.
Re: Why GNU/Linux Viruses Are Fairly Uncommon
#3On a more serious note, I'm surprised there hasn't been much discussion about potential malware in official Linux package repositories vs. developer-centric source repositories like npm, rubygems, crates.io, etc.
One would hope that the bar is higher with strict maintainership rules, but there are a zillion packages, and you can't vet them all. Also, practically everyone installs binary packages, so until we have fully reproducible builds, hiding malware in some obscure but heavily depended on package could actually be relatively easy.
Re: Why GNU/Linux Viruses Are Fairly Uncommon
#4It's a joke, not analysis. Was hoping for the latter.
I think the real answer is that relatively few people use GNU/Linux
Re: Why GNU/Linux Viruses Are Fairly Uncommon
#5On a more serious note, I'm surprised there hasn't been much discussion about potential malware in official Linux package repositories vs. developer-centric source repositories like npm, rubygems, crates.io, etc. One would hope that the bar is higher with strict maintainership rules, but there are a zillion packages, and you can't vet them all. Also, practically everyone installs binary packages, so until we have ful…
Nix/Guix are quite cool to tackle this.
They are progressing quite quickly towards reproducible builds, so you can avoid compromised servers sending malicious binaries.
Also, since package definitions are quite declarative, I guess it's easier to perform static verification to spot malicious code getting introduced there.
There's e.g. Vulnix that scans for CVEs [1].
Re: Why GNU/Linux Viruses Are Fairly Uncommon
#6I've always sort of suspected there might be a 'don't shit where you eat' component to it. If you're just being a dick by screwing with people for fun, not profit, then maybe you screw with the windows users instead of your fellow linux users. Maybe that's giving them too much credit though.
Re: Why GNU/Linux Viruses Are Fairly Uncommon
#7It's a joke, not analysis. Was hoping for the latter.
what is the latter? not an analysis?
Re: Why GNU/Linux Viruses Are Fairly Uncommon
#8It's a joke, not analysis. Was hoping for the latter.
I think the real answer is that relatively few people use GNU/Linux
That's about 95% of it. There are other things that give Linux a bit more of an edge in this space as well.
For example, every time I use Windows, it feels like every app is asking to run as administrator. Admittedly, I haven't used Windows for about a year, but in Linux, it's pretty rare that I ever do admin/sudo outside of the command line, and I only ever use it when I know what I'm doing. Obviously this isn't something that could not be fixed in Windows, and maybe it already has been.
Re: Why GNU/Linux Viruses Are Fairly Uncommon
#9Re: Why GNU/Linux Viruses Are Fairly Uncommon
#10It's a joke, not analysis. Was hoping for the latter.
I think the real answer is that relatively few people use GNU/Linux
Yea, probably 1% or less of desktop users. However, I bet those targets would be extremely high value (dev environments, server access). I am sure advanced groups heavily invest in gaining access to servers.