Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!decwrl!labrea!csli!gandalf
From: gandalf@csli.STANFORD.EDU (Juergen Wagner)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Internet UNIX virus
Message-ID: <6279@csli.STANFORD.EDU>
Date: 4 Nov 88 19:43:28 GMT
References: <13232@oberon.USC.EDU>
Reply-To: gandalf@csli.stanford.edu (Juergen Wagner)
Organization: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford U.
Lines: 29

In article <13232@oberon.USC.EDU> papa@pollux.usc.edu (Marco Papa) writes:
>This is dedicated to all the guys that claimed that "UNIX is much more
>secure than the Amiga" with regard to viruses.
...[copy of a posting to comp.bugs.4bsd.ucb-fixes deleted]..

\begin{flame}

Nonsense! UNIX is an operating system far more complex than Amiga DOS or 
whatever it is called. UNIX can be networked, and in such systems, it is
much more likely to have these problems. That's not a UNIX problem (on
those old CDC6600 machines, passwords could be obtained as readable text
with some tricks).

You are comparing apples and pears. Oh, and I sohould mention that Amiga
DOS (or whatever) is much more vulnerable to Virus attacks because
	o  it doesn't have protection mechanisms as UNIX has (single-user
	   machine),
	o  it grants everybody working on the machine full access to the
	   entire system.
Therefore, a virus introduced via infected disks can be much more harmful than
under UNIX where you still have the problem of gaining root access in order
to be able to do really nasty things (other than using up resources as e.g.
CPU, memory, disk space).

\end{flame}

-- 
Juergen "Gandalf" Wagner,		   gandalf@csli.stanford.edu
Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), Stanford CA