From a Ner friend:

On Thu, 2002-10-03 at 10:54, … wrote:

Further to that, I would suggest that you be aware that a virus specifically targeting the linux community is in the wild (see http://www.wildlist.org) – the slapper virus.

Actually there are about four or five known viruses and worms for Linux. One of them even has a switch to uninstall it.

Most of this viruses and worms have a lot of difficulty replicating themselves, and more trouble damaging anything but the files of those stupid enough to save them to disk and run them.

The slapper virus you mention exploits a hole in an old version of openssl and apache and for the average user won’t even be noticed as you have to be hosting secure websites using mod_ssl. Any sysadmin that got hit by this virus should rethink whether they should be running secure websites if they are this slow to patch well know security holes with know fixes.

Linux is no longer the “safest” option by means of it’s O/S. Precautions and safety measures must be taken here as well… admittedly, it is natively safer (less needs to be done to secure it out of the box), but it seems that this is becoming less the case (sadly).

While other OS’s may be more secure, finding a viable desktop OS that’s more secure would be interesting.

For the record, I recommend both Lunix and Windows to friends/workmates/customers… depending on their needs and available cash.

Excellent. Both have their place. The problem at the moment is that people think that Windows is the only ‘real’ option on the desktop when in fact this is not the case.