virus on unix??

[T G Manikandan]

Hello,
Our network NT machines are infected with FUNLOVE virus.
I have heard that unix OS is free from virus problems.Is that true?Please provide some comments on that.
If I map the unix drives to NT using nfs is there any way that the above becomes true?

Thanks
Manikandan

[Thierry Poels_1]

Hi,

As far as I know there are no HP-UX viruses.
If unix drives are mapped on NT they might contain files with viruses but they shouldn't be harmfull for the unix box.
However if a virus starts erasing files on an NT server it might also delete files on the mapped unix drive (as far as the user has write permissions).
Note: a good and regularly update virus scanner for your NT servers / PC's is worth its price.

good luck,
Thierry.

[T G Manikandan]

Hello,
I have two sun unix boxes.On one of the box I have a dump which contains some NT exe files and other files.
At present we have a FUNLOVE virus in the network.
When these files are transfered to another sun machine the size of some of the files are large and the modified time is the latest.
So when I do an ls -l on the files on both the machines the file size differs and the modified time differs.
Is there some virus on the network which affect these NT exe's and other files.

Please resolve the issue.

Thanks.
Manikandan

[Thierry Poels_1]

The Sun box will normally not spread the virus: it might contain files which carry the virus. The NT's or other PC's are responsible for spreading for spreading the virus.
Get a virus scanner on ALL NT's, PC's, ... and remove it. You might also want to disable you mail server, to prevent spreading the virus via mail (to you customers?).
good luck,
Thierry

BTW : "This member has assigned points to 0 of 34 responses to his/her questions." tsss tsss

[Steffi Jones_1]

Hello,

I checked a while back and I couldn't find any virus software for HPUX

As said before you don't have to worry about viruses from the nt box even if they make their way to an hpux environment.

Steffi Jones

[Brian Markus]

The only thing that can affect a Unix platform is a Malitious unix script or program. They have to be written specifically for unix. PC Viruses can not crash or harm the unix environment unless you run them as root. A standard user does not have the permissions to do any damage. There are "Virus Scanners" for Unix, but they are made to scan PC files you store on the Unix server. Such as Word Doc's or things of that nature. Hackers do tend to put worms and back doors in Releases of software. So that they can comprimise your system. But you cant get infected by something like that. You have to phycially Compile the code then run it, so in general if your smart about it you woln't have problems.

hope this helps

Brian

[Paula J Frazer-Campbell]

Hi

The anti virus device on HP-UX servers is the sysadmin in that he/she should be aware of exactly what is going on on the machine.

Hp do a very good security course for their machines and is one of the best I have attended.


Paula

[Bill Hassell]

In general, there are no known virus attacks for Unix, especially for non-PC hardware. It is quite difficult to write machine level code when each manufacturer has completely incompatible computer chips. It requires an enormous amount of research to locate the formats for boot sectors, volume managers and filesystems, all of which must be well known to make an effective virus.

For the hacker, it is simply too much work for too small of an audience.

Now email is even more interesting. Unix email (native email clients such as elm and mailx) are completely immune as the viewer is just dumb ASCII and cannot execute anything. This is a case where a dumb email progam is a very powerful tool to eliminate virus and macro attacks.

However, HP-UX will not filter anything that is simply stored on a disk or forwarded to a PC. The problem is in the PC, not HP-UX.