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Kaspersky Lab‘s announcement of a Windows/Linux cross-platform virus was the scoop of last week (source code available of course).

Now, there are obvious difficulties to spreading viruses on Linux and other properly designed systems, as demonstrated the lack of Linux viruses despite the availability of the ELF Virus Writing HOWTO since 2002. But the saddest part is that the virus didn’t actually work on Linux kernels later than 2.6.16, as demonstrated by the testing and analysis published by Hans-Werner Hilse.

Linus Torvalds agreed with Hilse’s analysis but was left wondering why the virus worked on older kernels but not the post-2.6.16 ones. He examined the situation and found a bug in GCC (the GNU C compiler) which was triggered by some code in the new kernels (I’m not going to pretend I understand any of this). Naturally he was intrigued by a program which could run natively on both Windows and Linux platforms.

Linus’s explanation about the bug was published today on Newsforge. The funniest thing is, Linux has fixed the flaw and made the virus work on all versions of Linux. This might come as an embarrassment to Kaspersky, who obviously was going to cash in on the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt triggered by a Linux virus and the users’ need to suddenly buy Linux anti-virus software from them. Fortunately the free software hackers were again more than happy to help make broken code work again.

Let’s see if anybody will buy anti-virus software for Linux now, or Kaspersky’s software for any platform.

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