[NTLUG:Discuss] information about viruses

[Kyle_Davenport@compusa.com]

I was just looking into this myself, after getting into a flame-mail war
with my ISP's tech support.   The answer is "yes, it's theoretically
possible to make a linux virus.  In practice, you will never see one."
Part of the problem is most people don't even no what a virus is, but I
will spare y'all the boring details.  This is the best accounting of
virus's I came across:

            Linux       Windows
Viruses           30          70,000
Worms       70          100,000
Trojans           130         >300,000          (hard to restrict because a
trojan could be defined as any executable which does something you don't
want it to.)

Of course, the linux virus's were mostly lab creations which never entered
the"wild".

P.S.  This fight with tech support was over them refusing to create a
postmaster account for the mail domain!  Despite RFC requirements and
emails from sourceforge.net (which require that), I could never get them to
admit it was a problem.