write a Linux virus in 5 easy steps

[Christoph Mende]

On Fri, 13 Feb 2009 13:10:25 +0800
cathayan <cathayan at gmail.com> wrote:

> hi,
> 
> Maybe some people here have already noticed this article:
> 
> http://lwn.net/Articles/319072
> http://www.geekzone.co.nz/foobar/6229
> 
> The author proposed a method to write KDE/Gnome virus, by using the
> .desktop file and autostart feature of modern DE. I tried on Xfce4.4,
> and got a same result. So, what do you think of it?
> 
> BTW, where does the Xfce4 save its own autostart configuration file
> (used by xfce4-autostart-editor)?
> 
> 

Not sure if this is anywhere near critical... the author himself says
several times "this requires extreme user stupidity" and... considering
that most desktop machines are x86 or can at least execute x86 binaries
(amd64 multilib), I can see I wrote an even better virus. This is my
version: a simple C app that listens on some port, accepts every
connection, executes everything sent to it and echos back the result.
And guess what, the source is 32 lines. You just have to send the
compiled version (maybe even statically linked, even though it's only
linked against glibc) and tell the user to execute it.

To your question: Auto-started apps are in ~/.config/autostart, think
that's the path specified by some FDO spec or something.

-- 
Christoph Mende
Gentoo/AMD64 Operational Lead and Release Engineering
GPG: EE2A 454A 6A3B A2D8 E43B  FF45 2A19 C3B3 6DA0 C1AF
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