Re: AppleScript and Email clients
Re: AppleScript and Email clients
- Subject: Re: AppleScript and Email clients
- From: Paul Berkowitz <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 07 Jan 2002 18:59:45 -0800
On 1/7/02 6:22 PM, "Phi Sanders" <email@hidden> wrote:
>
On the Mac there has YET to be a case of a plain-text virus, like there
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HAVE BEEN on Windows systems running Microsoft email products. It works
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because M$ implemented their client to automatically execute certain
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classes of text files that contain source code. The intention was good,
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but they didn't think the consequences through and that's how the road
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gets paved...
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>
Quotes from Sophos Anti Virus :
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> The virus sends itself as an email attachment, the name of which is
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> either the original name of the infected file or a randomly generated
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> name. It uses one of the following extensions: COM, BAT, PIF and EXE.
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> Sometimes it also attaches additional GIF, DOC or TXT files to the email.
>
>
> The email uses a known exploit in certain versions of Outlook Express 5
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> in order to launch the attached file automatically.
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>
As soon as a person views the message - without opening the attachment -
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it is executed. This behavior was the default when the troublesome
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products shipped, although I believe it has been changed now. At any
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rate, there is no technical reason the same cannot happen on the Mac - an
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equivalent hole has simply never been created to be taken advantage of.
No, this can't happen on a Mac. Period. There are no extensions such as
.exe, .com or the others which are self-executing files. There just aren't.
And - not that it makes any difference here - OE Mac is a completely
different product from OE Windows, and there is nothing in it which could
trigger such an event even if such events could be triggered on the Mac,
which they can't. Period.
--
Paul Berkowitz