Author: Randall Shane
Date: 12:56:03 05/04/00
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On May 04, 2000 at 14:01:03, Frederic Friedel wrote: <snips> >Actually it's much worse than I initially thought. CNN, Sky, BBC, German TV, all >of whom are carrying the story as headline news, keep advocating the same >remedies: immediately delete any message entitled "I love you". Second remedy: >get a virus protection update. > >This is rubbish. The virus comes to you as a Visual Basic source file. In five >minutes you can change the title to "Important message" or "Virus warning". And >I really don't know how Symantec and Mcafee can keep up with thousands of clones >per day. > >Somebody on this thread suggeste a different remedy and protection: switch to >Linux. This virus may turn out to be a bigger problem for Microsoft than all the >current anti-trust lawsuits. The basic problem is in Outlook allowing executable code (such as VBScript) to be executed without warning in the first place. If one uses a Windows mail program that does have (dubious) VBScript support, there isn't a problem. The virus checkers don't look at program titles or file names. Instead, they look for 'file signatures' -- sequences of bytes, indicating possibly troublesome program code, that matches against a list of signatures in the program. Keeping up with the mutations of Love Letter won't be too difficult, just time-consuming. The real problem is, as always, keepig up with what's going to happen next. And when the default security level of the most popular mail program and the most popular office suite on the most popular computing platform is so low, viruses and worms will happen, again and again.
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