[PLUG] Mandriva And Mandriva...

[म.हा.सा.ग.र]

On Sunday 24 August 2008 21:31:42 Aditya Laghate wrote:
> On Sun, 2008-08-24 at 20:51 +0530, Arun Khan wrote:
> > On Sunday 24 Aug 2008, म.हा.सा.ग.र wrote:
> >   When I inserted his USB pen drive on my Ubuntu
> > 8.04.1 I noticed a lot of <dir>.exe files created on my hard disk.
> > Obviously, the pen drive was infected but worse yet the virus was able
> > to create the files on my system.  Luckily the damage was contained
> > since the .exe files could not run on my system.  I disabled "auto run"
> > in Nautilus.  Ease of use has it's down side.
>
> This is funny!! I have till date (in the last 10 years) never seen a
> virus file replicating on Linux!! Are you sure it came from the
> pen-drive and not were already present??
>
> Because, by logic and theory, the executable on the pen-drive CANNOT
> execute on Linux. A windows executable CANNOT run on Linux.
>
> There is something fishy here!
>
> Cheers
> Aditya
>

Few months back I found that some virus or an html exploit had played a trick 
of it's own on my KMail folders such that many messages were showing all 
fields such as "Subject" and more as unknown.  Opening those caused more 
problems.  

That is when I realised importance of using maildir format instead of mailbox 
format.  Since in case of mbox format the ClamAV will move entire mailbox to 
quarantine!  Of course I was not using ClamAV till then :-)

So if you ask me, Linux is immune to Viruses ... yes but not immune to all 
kinds of exploits.  And we use quite a bunch of technologies even while 
handling our *simple electronic mail*