Malware: Fighting Malicious Code

The Linux Kernel

Way back in the heady days of 1991, Linus Torvalds started the project that created the Linux kernel. Today, Torvalds still heads the team that maintains and updates the kernel. Given the Herculean efforts of Torvalds and his team, many people refer to the entire operating system as Linux. However, this terminology, although convenient, is imprecise. If you want to be very particular, the term Linux really refers to just the kernel itself, the component of the operating system Torvalds and team crafted and currently maintain.

The rest of the operating system consists of a multitude of different open-source projects, developed by a variety of different groups and collected together in various distributions. For example, the folks ...