First advantage over Windows which every one claims is, Linux is free from virus so it doesn’t need any antivirus…WRONG!

Don’t live in a ‘fool’s paradise’, they also have Linux in their sights!
Only problem is, there are so many distros, they don’t know where to start…lol!

 

Jokes apart, Linux antivirus products do exist, its just that the number is far too low when compared to those of Windows. Have a look at few major reasons behind this:

• Why would a virus writer spend a considerable amount of time is writing a virus which no one (read: less) would notice? Attention is all they want. Since the major market share is acquired by Windows users so it is the first choice to hit upon.
• In comparison to Linux users, windows users are more prone to committing mistakes and allowing virus to damage their systems.
• This is quite debatable but it’s true that Windows has more exploitable security loop holes.
• If a loop hole is discovered in Linux, it is patched before anyone notices. The code is analyzed and updated by a large number of programmers due to its open source nature, in comparison to windows.

It would not be correct to say Linux machines are never infected; they are vulnerable to “rootkit”. Rootkits allow attacker to get top level access to victim’s machine and have full control and during attack user is never alerted about this. Rootkit can spy or modify data and even run applications in background. Some other threats to Linux machines are poisoned DNS entries, spam gateways, backdoor botnets, etc.

You can have a look over the list of viruses here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_computer_viruses#Threats