[clug] Anti-Virus Software

[Alex Satrapa]

On 25/06/2010, at 08:55 , steve jenkin wrote:
> Apple iPhone could be fundamentally broken, and not even Apple would know.

SELinux could be fundamentally broken, and noone would ever know. The processors in our computers are manufactured in China, who's to say that they don't have backdoors similar to the F00F bug which allow userspace code to elevate itself to a special mode above the hypervisor?

Heck, who's to say our routers (which just about universally have sFlow or similar monitoring software installed) aren't flicking random packets back to the mother land?

How do you verify that your network is behaving the way you expect, when your tshark software is listening on an Ethernet interface whose chipset is excluding the naughty packets that the routers are sending back to the mother land?

How do you know that your tinfoil hat is made of the correct foil? Maybe the bad guys have microrepeaters in all tin foil products which amplify specific signals, not only defeating the purpose of the tin foil hat, but actually enhancing the function of the mind control rays?

But back to the original topic: Linux is not immune to malware. There are SMTP open relay blacklists for a reason: operators make mistakes, and try to do things they don't understand, or fall into traps they didn't know about.

Alex