The attitude in the comments regarding the "look you can see how it's built" is concerning.

A simple virus could easily backdoor every binary on the system which built the file, rince and repeat.

Before anyone says that Linux virus do not exist, I have written a handful, as I'm sure many others have. Do not assume lack of observation to be confirmation of your view.

I don't think I know a single IT professional that would allege that Linux viruses don't exist.

Meaning none you'd keep close,

or that you've genuinely never come across one?

I mean, just stop by reddit!

Fascinating. If you feel like sharing, what was your motive? Profit, research, the lulz?

I have always been interested in how these things work, and based an early one on Silvio Cesares paper ( https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/hh/virus/unix-viruses.txt ) as I was associates with him while at university. This virus was to confirm what was written in the paper.

The second I wrote was attempting to exploit the trust that erlang VM's have with each other. I have rewritten a few in various BEAM based languages, this was to give evidence to management that security/protections should be put in place for erlang clustering (rabbitmq, HA erlang, etc).

Another was for working for a large north american linux vendors product security group, In an effort to know ones enemy and the effort involved in some of the 'in-the-field' backdoors that were found. In this case, I was reproducing the "virus/RAT" (I use that term loosely) that contained dirtycow exploit primitive in the wild. I also reversed/reproduced/(exploited ?) their exploitable C&C infrastructure. This information was handed over to the law enforcement and I've never heard any more about it.

Each virus had its own reason, none of them escaped my demonstrations.

Very thought provoking, thanks for the detailed answer!

did you ever publish the erl research?

that sounds extremely interesting and useful. specially now with the elixir renascence

Yeah that part has always been weird. I will say that it works wonderfully, especially if you need to install windows from a usb but only have computers running Linux/Mac available