RE: linux safe from viruses?

["Atul Chitnis" <achitnis@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> And of course since many people (including me) make their VFAT Winduhs
> partitions user-mountable in Linux, it is theoretically possible for s
> Linux virus to attack a user, mount the Winduhs partition and destroy
> the data on it.

He he he, well, true and false.

A real Linux server will not have a Windows partition to begin with (my main
server does not, for example), but on a workstation, it is possible that a
user will mount the Windows partition, and if (mythical) Linux virus/trojan
would quickly target such a partition and destroy it. But tell me Raju - is
that really so bad? ;-)

Seriously, a sensible user would mount the partition in ReadOnly mode or
(like me) make it RW to root only, and RO to normal users.

I created a system account group called "dos"

groupadd -r dos

then added root to that group

dos::18:root

Next I edited /etc/fstab to make sure that /dosc (my Windows partition) is
mounted in such a way that only members of group dos can access it:

/dev/hda1	/dosc	vfat	 suid,ro,uid=0,gid=18,umask=007 0 0

Notice that I mounted it read-only. This is extra protection just in case I
am actually su'd in if something hits. If I really want to write to that
partition (which frankly speaking is *extremely rare), I unmount it and
remount it read-write for that occasion *only*.

> Come to think of it, that won't be such a bad idea!  Anyone wanna help
> me in writing one?

You want to write a virus to destroy the Windows partition? But why? Just
leave it to itself - Windows will do the job for you soon enough! ;-)

Atul


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