Torvalds Creates Patch for Cross-Platform Virus

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Tuesday April 18, 2006 @09:12AM from the just-here-to-make-things-work dept.

Newsforge is reporting that Linus Torvalds took a few minutes to review the cross-platform proof of concept virus covered yesterday and has proven that the virus does indeed not work with latest kernel version 2.6.16 and even released a patch in order to fix this "problem." From the article: "The reason that the virus is not propagating itself in the latest kernel versions is due to a bug in how GCC handles specific registers in a particular system call. [...] So the virus did a number of strange things to make this show up, but on the other hand the kernel does try to avoid touching user registers, even if we've never really _guaranteed_ that. So the 2.6.16 effect is a mis-feature, even if a _normal_ app would never care. It just happened to bite the infection logic of your virus thing."

2 of 195 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Re:Does this mean... by aardvarkjoe · 2006-04-18 11:38 · Score: 0, Offtopic

No Child Left Behind is an old, outdated program. The new one is much improved.

--

How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
As a regular Windows user I'd like to say... by onyx00 · 2006-04-19 01:19 · Score: 0, Offtopic

Welcome to my world, Linux users!