Linux popularity breeds more Worms

          Windows is not the only O.S to suffer from viruses, worms and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, according to experts at the Virus Bulletin conference in Prague.
 
          Jakub Kaminski of Computer Associates Australia, said that Unix, Solaris and Linux systems have seen some serious threats in the wild for the first time this year.
 
          The amount of Linux bugs and worms has risen sharply over the last 12 months, and viruses such as Ramen have spread wildly.
 
          “The last 12 months have proved that Linux is here to stay. Unfortunately, there is also a steady increase in the occurrence and variety of malicious software written for Linux.
 
          There are a number of new Linux viruses, but the main work is being done in the area of Trojans, especially backdoor ones, and vulnerability exploits such as DDoS attacks.” said Kaminski.
 
          He predicted that the increasing popularity of Linux Systems will bring more viruses that use a cocktail of binary code and shell scripts to cross platforms.
 
          Some BSD systems such as FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD are also at risk because they have the ability to emulate Linux a.out and ELF binaries. Kaminski also said that Linux viruses were able to replicate – a problem that could result from not installing Linux libraries properly.
 
          He expected the success of DDoS worms such as CodeRed and Nimda to encourage virus writers to launch attacks on more machines, hitting Linux and Solaris by exploiting unpatched systems.
 
          Joe HartMann, director of Antivirus research for North America at Trend Micro, said that most operating systems are at risk from buffer overflows because the C++ language they are based on has no buffer    clean-up capability.

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