Linux Trojan Goes Unnoticed For A Year (Unreal IRCd)

Exaggeration, much? Since when is seven months equal to a year?

Let's see if we can take a story about a relatively obscure IRC server, call it popular, exaggerate the seriousness and exaggerate how long it went unnoticed all in one article.

Yes, there was malware in a gzipped tarball in the archive. Yes, it went unnoticed for too long. Stick with the facts and dump the sensationalism.

I also like how it's a page loaded with advertisements, and the "story" is nothing but a quote from someone else's page, that can be found elsewhere.

This "pages for clicks" thing is malware for LXer.

The thing is that this bullsh** is copied on several sites, even on other than English sites : http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/198686/linux_t... [url=http://www.security.nl/artikel/33613/1/"Linux_geeft_vals_gevoel_van_veiligheid".html]http://www.security.nl/artikel/33613/1/"Linux_geeft_vals_gev...[/url] http://www.securelist.com/en/blog/2205/Unreal_Backdoored_IRC... http://techworld.nl/technologie/25453/linux-trojan-in-unreal... http://news.google.com/news/more?pz=1&cf=all&cf=all&ncl=d4dX... http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/IRC-server-had-ba...

It's a man-bites-dog story.

Like a child being shot makes international news, while a drowning doesn't because it's far more common, this is very likely the first "Linux malware" that any of these people have ever heard of.

True Bob, linux malware stories are second in rarity only to "Windows clears list of all vulnerabilities" stories.

Unlike Windows drive-by infections, this one had to be downloaded, installed, and configured. That point was glossed over. The other glaring omission is: how many in the wild security breaches have there been due to this?

This is just another case of the Anti-"malware" industry getting a PR Hit.

The anti-virus (and now anti-malware) folks have slobbered over the idea of Unix viruses & etc for ages: at least since the Morris Worm of '88. Every year, just like the Linux Desktop, the Anti-"malware" people want Linux to start suffering viruses and stuff just like Windows. And it never happens. The best they can do is some lame backdoor every once in a while, now that network worms aren't getting written very often.

The history of people predicting Unix, and now Linux, malware is long, inglorious and littered with failures.

In the meantime, the "anti-virus" people are dealing with things like Delphi-compiler viruses (http://www.virusbtn.com/virusbulletin/archive/2009/09/vb2009...). The author of that one claims that the population is so huge that even very specific things (Borland's Delphi environment) can support plagues of viruses. Meanwhile, Linux, with probably 5% of the desktops, and more of the servers, doesn't get viruses in practice.

Denial isn't just a river in Egypt. It's part of the culture of anti-virus.