From: STeve Andre' (andres_at_msu.edu)
Date: Sat May 04 2002 - 01:23:15 EDT
You are right, such a virus could be created. The good news
that is that most people who write these things are fairly dull
souls. Every once in a while a new, innovative virus comes
along, but most are variants of others.
Attachments reek. They are not a good idea, and the entire
concept of MIME is really a digusting kludge. Add that
kludge to a flawed transport system as MS has, and you
have the perfect recipe for disaster. Thanks, MicroSoft.
You can indeed get viri from web sites. Once we got our
computing infrastructure back up (we moved), I put Norton
AV on my son's computer once it was on the net again.
He didn't see the reasoning for it, not really since he doesn't
get emali on that machine. A few days later NAV jumped
up and quarantined a nasty virus which came from a gaming
web site. At work several people have gotten them, and
were very puzzled by it--people seem to think that viri come
from email.
An interesting concept, viri that help...
--STeve Andre'
On Friday 03 May 2002 04:32 pm, Jonathan Berry wrote:
> In article <200204302115.g3ULFFi37930_at_pilot25.cl.msu.edu>,
>
> "STeve Andre'" <andres_at_msu.edu> wrote:
> >But a human-to-human protocol is far harder to spoof, and if you
> >always used an exchange phrase (Froofinfratz!) in your message,
> >a viri will have a far harder time figuring out how to deal with you
> >and get you to open something.
>
> But imagine a virus that waits until you send an attachment,
> preserves the text part, but substitutes its own payload.
>
> It seems to me that a step towards eliminating virii would be
> if they could find (not sure how, but maybe through virus
> checking programs, constructing a database, then working
> backwards in time) where the virus originated. That might be
> the smoking gun that points towards the author of the virus.
>
> By comparison, you don't hear much about picking up viruses by
> downloading executables from a web site. It's never happened
> to me, anyway. Such executables would be traceable in a most
> obvious way.
>
> I'm still hoping for viruses that will do good. You know, a
> virus that will remove adware and spyware from my machine with
> no ill effects. Is there a Dennis Moore virus?
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