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To say that Linux is completely free from viruses and malware is not entirely true. It is, however, much more resistant to it than Windows is. Root accounts, prompt patching of security holes, and a heterogeneous mixture of software make Linux a much more difficult target when developing malware. I would say that is never going to be necessary to run anti-virus software for Linux, I do not think they work very well in Windows and they certainly do not belong in Linux. Education is still the best way to prevent viruses. Never install software from sources you do not trust. Ubuntu and other distributions already verify that every package that is installed is signed by the correct provider. The best defense against viruses and other attacks is what it has always bee, keep your software up to date. Spyware, viruses and other malware have become an increasing problem on Microsoft Windows based systems and have caused many Windows users to switch over to using other operating systems. I am going to be focusing on GNU/Linux (hereafter referred to as Linux) because of its availability and the concepts and ideas about viruses in Linux apply to other Unix based operating systems such as Mac OS X. Historically, users of Linux have had virtually no issues with spyware, viruses or other malware. Many have thought it was just because they did not have a large enough market share to attract malware authors but the reality is that Linux is so fundamentally different from Windows that it is much more resistant to virus or spyware infections and other forms of malware. Security holes in Linux and Windows Security holes are not unheard of in Linux but they appear less often and are less severe than security holes in Windows. First let's compare the default web browser of most Linux distributions (Firefox) with the default web browser of Windows (internet Explorer). Since we just want to know why Windows has more malware than Linux we will focus a single time period and see what security problems the two browsers had in that time period. Firefox 1.0 was release in November of 2004 and on May of 2005 version 1.0.4 was released. Each of the four minor revisions was to address security issues. In the same time frame Microsoft released 20 major patches to IE, most of which were rated "critical" (Livingston). These critical security problems meant that malware could be installed automatically on a Windows machine if the user just clicked on a link. A company by the name of Scanit did a study of the amount of time it took Microsoft to release a patch for a vulnerability once it became public. "The firm found that IE was wide open for a total of 200 days in 2004, or 54% of the year, to exploits that were "in the wild" on the Internet (Livingston)." That meant that any script kiddy could download some html, upload it to a website and every person that visited that site could be compromised 50% of the time, even if they had installed the latest Windows updates. Firefox had a few security problems of it own, even to the point where code could be executed remotely but in every case a patch was issued before the security problem was made public. The exploits were always written after the problem had been fixed. Everyone remembers the Sasser and Blaster worms that infected millions of Windows machines overnight using security vulnerabilities in the DCOM protocol which is hardly ever used by desktop computers and is enabled by default. Linux has about 10 total worms all of which were released weeks sometimes months after patches were issued for the security holes the worms used (Moen). Very few Linux machines were even vulnerable to the worms because most of them targeted the BIND name server which is only used by Internet servers. Actually, none of the worms would have been able to compromise a desktop system unless it was running some server software.

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