[mdlug] I tremble for my OS when I reflect that virus-writers are so frickin' devious

[Jeff Hanson]

On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 11:44 AM, Ingles, Raymond
<Raymond.Ingles at compuware.com> wrote:
> So my wife opens an email she really shouldn't have. At least she's
> running Thunderbird and not Outlook, but it still installs some crap and
> has popups coming up regularly on the screen. Of course, you can't get
> to antivirus stuff from that machine, even with Firefox - queries like
> that get redirected to random links.

I fixed a system that had that problem.

>  Using the standard tools like Spybot and Ad-aware - downloaded from the
> Linux box downstairs - I seem to have killed it. But it did a 'clever'
> trick - it had reconfigured Firefox to use a proxy on localhost at port
> 7171. That's right, it was running its own HTTP proxy.

Most malware updates those tools for you to keep their competitors out.

>  Eventually these schmucks are going to target Linux. Linux has *better*
> security than Windows (it'd be hard to be worse) but it's far from
> invulnerable. I really don't want to have to clean up crap like that on
> my Linux box. Oy.>

Not binary compatible.  Maybe Wine will someday progress to the point
where it can run Windows malware but it's not ready yet.  Linux
systems are not homogeneous so propagation wouldn't be easy (the same
thing that annoys commercial developers).