topic Re: Do viruses affect HP-UX in Operating System - HP-UX

Do viruses affect HP-UX

ASO CENTRAL — Mon, 17 Sep 2001 13:13:00 GMT

Has anyone know of an instance where a virus has infected an HP-UX system? Are there precautions that should be taken? Any virus prtection software?

Thanks,
Mike

Re: Do viruses affect HP-UX

paul courry — Mon, 17 Sep 2001 13:14:42 GMT

Keep your system patched and read the security digests (see other section on this web site).

I will let others comment on their virus experiences, we've been clean.

Re: Do viruses affect HP-UX

David Navarro — Mon, 17 Sep 2001 13:16:45 GMT

Hi, a Virus will affect all systems that has been considered for pepople who do that virus, that is, if you create a virus for HP-UX, the your virus will affect HP-UX machines.
Viruses written for PC's will no affect HP-UX machines.
I don't know any virus in HP-UX and I don't know any antivirus for HP-UX also.

Re: Do viruses affect HP-UX

Edward Alfert_2 — Mon, 17 Sep 2001 13:26:53 GMT

Here is a part of the readme.txt file included in the McAfee Total Virus Defense Suite.

It also goes on to list all the types of files it checks for viruses. It seems that certainly are viruses for HP-UX as well as other UNIX, but they probably aren't very common in the wild.

-----------

VirusScan for UNIX v4.7 software
runs with these UNIX operating systems:

* Hewlett-Packard HP-UX v10.20 and later
* IBM AIX v4.2.1 and later
* Linux v2.x kernels
* Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) OpenServer
Release 5
* Sun Microsystems Solaris for SPARC
architecture, v2.5.1 and later
* FreeBSD v3.2

NOTE: The current version of the UNIX
operating system that you require
must be installed and running
correctly before you install the
VirusScan for UNIX software.

* At least 4MB RAM of free hard disk space

* To install the VirusScan for UNIX
software and perform an on-demand
scan operation of your file system,
McAfee recommends that you have root
account permissions.

Re: Do viruses affect HP-UX

Scott_14 — Mon, 17 Sep 2001 14:58:14 GMT

just a helpful note, if your users store data, on your drives, like at one place I worked at, they used thier home drives for storage of data from thier PCs, I would scan that drive once a week. I just used My PC and with NFs, allowing me to mount the home drive as root, i would scan it, and clear up anything. Mostly I found the Macro viruses that effect Excel and Word.

scott

Re: Do viruses affect HP-UX

Mark Vollmers — Mon, 17 Sep 2001 18:32:54 GMT

There have been some threads on Unix and virus in the past, and I think there was only one mention of a virus. In general, the're not an issue, due to how secure (for lack of a better term) UNIX is compared to windows (root access needed to affect most things). I think the McAffe program searches for windows viruses on a Unix box. The best protection is to protect the root password and keep the server safe from outside attacks (tight permissions, etc).

Mark

Re: Do viruses affect HP-UX

Lothar Krueler — Tue, 18 Sep 2001 05:12:36 GMT

Hi,
I don?t know if McAffe scans for Unix-viruses. But look at www.sophos.com . There you can download a trial version of virusscanner for unix viruses. The man page mentions "PC-Files
on Unix-Hosts" but while a phone call they told me that the scanner scans for unix-viruses too.
Lothar

Re: Do viruses affect HP-UX

Sridhar Bhaskarla — Tue, 18 Sep 2001 05:53:32 GMT

So far, I never heard any instances of VIRUSes on UNIX systems. The processes are visibile unlike Windows. You can also go little bit inside and see the shared memory segs with ipcs. If your system is not tightly secured, you can have some programs that run as SUID programs that can become trojen horses and create problems. So, it's better to run security scans periodically and keep the system clean always. Keep track of bad logins and su attempts.

-Sri

Re: Do viruses affect HP-UX

Les Schuettpelz — Tue, 25 Sep 2001 18:19:13 GMT

Dave Fargo using Les's ITRC login...

Until recently, the word has been that viruses are developed to run on the platforms that can propagate them rapidly, for the purposes of inflicting damage on those platforms. Most statements have been phrased with words to the effect "virus programs are not adapted to exploit the typical systems and application architectures found on UNIX systems", something like that.

In other words, to paraphrase an anti-terrorist authority I heard on CNN this AM, a biological exploit is unlikely to be perpetrated waterborne when an airborne exploit is hundreds of times more efficent. So the UNIX server is at best like water, but the PC platform is like air.

I haven't looked into UNIX anti-virus software, but the purpose of this is probably to scan for the presence of all known virus signatures and prevent them from being stored and/or forwarded, rather than to prevent execution. It would be very environment-specific.