Re: Viruses

[Alan Shutko <ats acm org>]

"Roger Vaughn" <rvaughn@pobox.com> writes:

> And how about the recent flood of email-based virii?  Isn't it easy to
> imagine that one of your users could run an unknown email attachment on your
> Linux box?  (Proving only that virii don't even have to be smart to invade.)

This is much less likely on Unix boxes.  The problem on Windows is
that mailers completely ignore the mime-type and pass the filename to
the OS with some general "execute" call.  This will spawn a viewer
based on the extension, and the action for .exe is to run it.  Nice,
for binaries on your system, not nice for attachments.

In contrast, on Unix, every mailer I know ignores the extension and
spawns a viewer based on the mime-type.  And no mailer I know will run
executable files or scripts by default.  So clicking on something that
looks like a zip file will always spawn a zip viewer, never run the
file.

-- 
Alan Shutko <ats@acm.org> - Looking for a job in Long Island!
Check http://rescomp.wustl.edu/~ats/ for a resume.
Serving coffee on aircraft causes turbulence.