Re: "Bugbear" virus in Linux?

From: John Wingate (johnww_at_worldpath.net)
Date: 07/12/03 

Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2003 22:44:11 -0000

Patrick M Geahan <pmgeahan-usenet@thepatcave.org> wrote:
> Floyd Davidson <floyd@barrow.com> wrote:

>> Show us a Unix virus an *any* significance. Not a zoo virus,
>> not one that could do something if only this or that, but show
>> us one that _has_ infected a few thousand, or even a few
>> hundreds, of systems and caused a problem.

> Unnecessary.

> The question is whether such a virus is possible. If a 'zoo virus' does
> exist, then a Unix virus *is* possible.

Fred Cohen's virus experiments in 1983 were performed on a unix system.

His report "Computer Viruses - Theory and Experiments"
(http://www.all.net/books/virus/index.html), which introduced and
defined the term "virus", makes interesting reading. A couple of
excerpts from the section on experiments:

      On November 3, 1983, the first virus was conceived of as an
      experiment to be presented at a weekly seminar on computer security.
      The concept was first introduced in this seminar by the author, and
      the name 'virus' was thought of by Len Adleman. After 8 hours of
      expert work on a heavily loaded VAX 11/750 system running Unix, the
      first virus was completed and ready for demonstration. Within a
      week, permission was obtained to perform experiments, and 5
      experiments were performed. On November 10, the virus was
      demonstrated to the security seminar.

      ...

      Once the results of the experiments were announced, administrators
      decided that no further computer security experiments would be
      permitted on their system. This ban included the planned addition of
      traces which could track potential viruses and password augmentation
      experiments which could potentially have improved security to a
      great extent. This apparent fear reaction is typical, rather than
      try to solve technical problems technically, policy solutions are
      often chosen.

These were controlled experiments, so Cohen's viruses probably count as
zoo viruses. I doubt that Floyd's request for a significant wild unix
virus can be satisfied. 

-- 
John Wingate                    Learning facts takes valuable time that
johnww@worldpath.net            could be better spent developing biases.
                                                        --Richard Maine

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