Virus in Windows

[anang bohra]

Hi there
Can someone tell why windows is susceptible to virus and not Unix.
Thanks in advance

[Alexander M. Ermes]

Hi there.
Mostly you get windows virusses with emails.
The email clients of MS sometimes open attachments automatically, if these contain VBA
scripts or VB programs. Setup your email client not to open attachments or execute automatically. If oyu want to know, which viri are running at the moment, go to www.cert.org
These guys ( and ladies ) usually know about the latest stuff and might have a solution for these problems.
Put this URL to your favorites.
Rgds
Alexander M. Ermes

[Shahul]

Hi

See..Ur windows is using FAT based filesystem. It is not a secured system, Anybody can read , anybody can write...etc. But Unix is not like that, It is giving much importants for security. Its filesystem is implemented in such a way that normal virus can't enter and make changes there.

For example, U must have experienced master boot record viruses in Windows, What is happening is virus is entering and corrupting MBR of the HDD. There is no such special format for MBR in DOS/Windows. But Unix is using LIF (Logical Interchange Format) inplace of MBR. This format can read only by Unix.

If U want to know more about this go thru How Unix is managing filesystem.

Best of luck

Shahul

[anang bohra]

hi Shahul,
ur point seems quite logical but how then win NT gets affected when it is using NTFS file system..
could u explain elaborately
thanx in advance

[paul courry]

Why Windows is suseptible to viruses and not Unix?

Easy!

Microsoft makes crappy operating systems. They don't pay attention to security issues, they are slow to fix them, their implementations of standards are proprietary and full of holes, yada yada yada. Everything is sacrificed for "ease of use" to please the masses and no attention is paid to security issues.

Case in point is Active X. What other vendor do you know of that would put out a product that make the user vulnerable to any website that had malicious code on it?

Another case in point are all the holes, patches and fixes reported daily for Microsoft products. Do you know of any other vendor that would tolerate such a lack of quality control? As a counterexample, the HP3000 operating system, MPE, has been out since 1972 and sees *maybe* two security bulletins per year. Now THAT is quality control!