On Bugs, Viruses, Malware and Linux

Once more, this is a LinuxInsider article, and it comes with a creepy feelig of ulterior motive. This is the same author (or same pseudonym anyway) that wrote the "Shill Shocked" article a few days ago.

This is just another "he said/she said" type of article. The author did go out to quote mine a few blogs, and apparently exchanged email with a few slashdotters,. I suppose this is a change for the better, since the usual "reporting" about Linux malware just quotes Mikko Hyponen or some MacAfee marketeer, or some other "AV" insider with a vested interest in the appearance of a plague of Linux malware. But still, this is really similar in feeling to the usual tee vee network news story that concludes "only time will tell."

I'd have to say that what hides in the article, and appears only by omiision, is that Windows has a plauge of malware only because of its "document centricity". Make files, and email and other "content" easily executable, and people will by and large execute it. There's a couple of PEBKAC anecdotes in the story, which shorn of their smutty human interest, illustrate this precise point, but the author chooses not to explicitly make the point.

That covers the "email worm" category of malware, but you could make the same type of argument for every other thing:

"Macro" viruses: a problem with the design of "Word": it includes macros in the "doc" file, not in a separate file, probably to make "doc" files double-click-executable. The same-file-macro means that self-replicating macros can spread.

"Boot sector" viruses: if MS-DOS wasn't so downright cruddy, requiring constant reboots, boot sectors would not have spread.

Yadda yadda yadda. One could go on forever, but bad design does cause trouble.