Everyone should think about threats to their data. Cloud backup and laptops better be encrypted, services with open ports be shielded. Linux viruses do exist, especially for android and routers. But also whatever system has an outdated dokuwiki open in the wild is a welcome addition to a botnet. The value of a botnet is in number of infected systems and you don’t need root access to mine monero or take part in a ddos on a machine. Linux security is sincerely undervalued. Selinux, the grsec kernel patches, chrootjail, tripwire… do exist, but are a hassle to setup and maintain. The new container options are nice (docker or flatpack) having your webbrowser contained is not a bad idea.

Update your router, your desktop is spoiled for updates. I stop my 1 am ramblings here.

An antivirus is mostly just a blacklist of known malware. Sometimes heuristics are used such as ‘this piece of software isn’t installed on many PCs, and it appears to be doing shady stuff like, monitoring keystrokes or listening to your microphone’. But unless your antivirus is actually sentient there’s no way for it to really distinguish between a chat application that listens to your microphone so you can talk to your friends / monitor your keystrokes to know when you’ve hit the push-to-talk key, and a piece of actual malware that intends to spy on you and blackmail you.

What you have with a package manager is a whitelist of programs that have been selected by your distro maintainers. Is it completely impossible for someone to sneak malware into a distro’s repository? No, but its a lot easier to maintain a list of known good software than it is to maintain a list of known bad software. And in that situation your antivirus isn’t going to help you anyway, since the people maintaining its malware list aren’t going to magically know that something is malware before the distro maintainers do.

So, generally, just using your package manager instead of running random shit you find online is going to be a lot better than any antivirus. With things like Wayland and Flatseal becoming more common we’re heading towards a situation where fine-grained per-package permissions will become the standard way distros do things, making antivirus even more unnecessary.

We should have done that a long time ago, as the security model of ‘any program you run can do anything you can by default’, then blacklist the ones that inevitability abuse that privilege, is completely backwards.

I was just wondering, would immutable distros be even less affected than Unix systems in general?

SElinux is what you want

As someone who may obtain games and shows/movies through less than rights holder approved methods, ClamAV is a necessity.

ClamAV in the corner, visibly annoyed

I just switched to linux and totally forgot about this. Do I really not need one? 99% of what I do is steam gaming anyway so I’m not too worried, worst case I just format and reinstall, but still…

A few years ago I found a text (probably as image) where somebody ‘tried’ to run a virus on linux. It went something like this:

Wanted to install a virus on Ubuntu, but it was only available as an aur package. Tried converting. Didn’t work … Tried make virus, but didn’t work. Upgraded cmake, tried again, but some libraries were missing.

Tried installing libraries, but they were very outdated and I couldn’t find proper versions.

Checked the source to see what the libs were doing and replaced them.

and so on.

Does someone know what I’m talking about and possibly has the source?

Not having inter-distro binary compatibility is a blessing in disguise.

Does anyone have an idea what would happen if one runs a Windows virus with Wine ?

What anti-virus sudo you use?

Why GNU/Linux Viruses are fairly uncommon

Microsoft Defender 😊

/usr/bin/brain

When you get to server levels it’s about making sure the firewall rules are filtering correctly. Need external access for support, while blocking script kiddies attempts to gain ssh access. (Figuratively speaking)