Re: <nettime> Viruses on the Internet: Monoculture breeds parasites

[Menso Heus <menso@xs4all.nl>]

On Thu, 11 May 2000, Benjamin Geer wrote:

> On Wed, May 10, 2000 at 05:19:37PM -0400, Felix Stalder wrote:
> > Scott Culp, from the Microsoft Security Response Center was, in a sense,
> > right when he told the same newspaper: "This is a general issue, not a
> > Microsoft issue. You can write a virus for any platform."
> 
> This is simply false.  If your mail program doesn't run executables
> that it receives, there is no way that anyone can write a virus for
> your platform.
> 
> My home computer is running Linux; my mail-retrieval utility is
> Fetchmail, and my mail agent is Mutt.  These programs simply do not
> run executables that they receive.  There is no reason that they
> should.  If someone sends me a program, and I want to run it, I'm
> perfectly capable of doing that myself.  It's completely absurd for a
> mail agent to make that decision for the user.
> 
> There are no viruses for Linux because Microsoft Outlook doesn't run
> on Linux.  It's that simple.

Ignorance is bliss I guess....
You claim to be a Software engineer and yet you seem to have no clue
whatsoever about how these virii work. 
If you would have taken the trouble to look at the source code of the
virus you would have noticed that any idiot could have written the Ilove
you virus and that it actually looks as if it was done by one.

You would also have noticed that the script uses an Outlook object to send
mail. The fact that microsoft offers objects which people can use in their
own code to send mail is very usefull imho. 

As a software engineer you should have known that the I Love You virus
could have been written for Unix or Linux as well, just put the code in a
shell script.

The *PROBLEM* is the *USER* Like always, it's the end-luser that goes 'hey
someone loves me clickclickclick' whithout paying attention to what it isz
they are actually opening.
The reason that this wouldn't work with Unix people is not because the os
doesn't allow it, but because Unix people have more clues about computing
in general... apparentally not all of them.

 
> Benjamin Geer
> Software Engineer

Menso Heus
BKFH
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Be a better bastard.  -- Josh Brandt 
...and the world will beat a luser to death at your door.  -- Carl Jacobs 
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