“Linus Torvalds has had an opportunity to examine the testing
and analysis by Hans-Werner Hilse which we reported on yesterday,
and has blessed it as being correct. The reason that the virus is
not propagating itself in the latest kernel versions is due to a
bug in how GCC handles specific registers in a particular system
call. He has coded a patch for the kernel to allow the virus to
work on even the latest Linux kernel.“That may sound terribly complex, so let’s break it down. A
system call is made when an application, in this case, the virus,
wants the kernel to perform a task for it: perhaps to read some
data, or write it to a file, or so on…”