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

["Benjamin Geer" <benjamin.geer@btinternet.com>]

On Fri, May 12, 2000 at 01:16:26PM -0400, Felix Stalder wrote:
> There are many other ways to create and spread viruses than as email
> attachments. A recent post in Phil Agre's RRE describes a virus that would
> run on any machine and does not need users to activate it.

I have read the description of this virus, and I remain sceptical.  The
author says that the virus is packaged as a shell script, but he doesn't
say how it's distributed, or how it arranges to be executed.  He mentions
a buffer-overflow vulnerability in PINE, which (as he admits) was
corrected long ago. 

This is the key point.  Regardless of how sophisticated a virus is at
doing its work without being noticed, that sophistication is useless if
the virus is never executed. 

Benjamin Geer




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