Jargons of Info Tech industry

[Mike Meyer]

Roedy Green <my_email_is_posted_on_my_website at munged.invalid> writes:

> On Wed, 12 Oct 2005 21:46:12 GMT, Tim Tyler <tim at tt1lock.org>  wrote
> or quoted :
>
>>Viruses can mail out change of address messages to everyone in the
>>compromised machine's address book today.
>>
>>Of course, viruses don't bother doing that - since it's stupid and
>>pointless.

Except with Roedy's proposal, all the targets correspondents address
books would get updated automatically. It's got much the same effect
as filling a change of address at the locate post office for
someone. It's a nasty practical joke. But much nicer than some of the
things that viruses do today.

> The key that makes that possible is Microsoft's features for running
> self-executing code in emails.  That is the problem. It has nothing to
> do with formatting or pictures.

No, that's what makes email a vector for infection. What makes using
the address book - for whatever purpose - possible for viruses is
having an API that allows arbitrary code to access it. But you have to
have that API - your customers are going to insist that they be able
to use their address book from third party applications.

These days, viruses don't spread through a single vector; they use
mutliple vectors, and will try them all once they've infected a
machine. So you may cruse a web site that infects you, and the virus
will then mail copies of itself to everyone in your address book, as
well as infecting any web servers that may be running on the machine,
and probing random IP addresses close to yours, and so on.

    <mike
-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>			http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/
Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information.