Linux Journal: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love Bugs

“While it is fun to pick on Microsoft about the love bug virus,
those of us in the Linux community should ask ourselves: are we
clean? The answer is: not at all. We are just a combination of not
having a high enough visibility and pure luck. The visibility issue
has to do with the fact that if you are going to write a virus,
then writing it for MS-Windows is the best target. There are just
more of those systems out there.”

“Now, let’s say that Linux has won the desktop war, thus making
Linux the best (as in most popular) target for viruses. And, just
to make things a little better (or more portable), let’s say all
those users have their systems configured so that attachments in
Java are executed automatically. Would it take a lot of work to
find everything that looked like an e-mail address in the user’s
mail or Mail subdirectory? How about removing all files in their
home directory and subdirectories that ended with .jpg and .gif? I
think not.”

“We are Linux people. If we succeed in world domination, we
will be the target. Clearly, it is time for us to work on some
innovation.”

Complete
Story