On Fri, Apr 29, 2005 at 11:57:24AM +0100, Nigel Wade wrote:
It was completely manual, the virus didn't install itself. It was injected by someone breaking in via ssh and then manually downloading an infected file. It's not like a STD, it's like a virus which can only be spread by direct injection.
That's the difference between a virus and a worm. It *does* have a mechanism to spread between files on a machine, but doesn't have one to go between machines without piggybacking on something else. (Which it did.)
For a virus to be viable it has to be able to infect files in such a way that those infected files are likely to spread the virus. This one doesn't. It needs to be spread manually, hence my threat rating of ~0.
-- Nigel Wade, System Administrator, Space Plasma Physics Group, University of Leicester, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK E-mail : nmw@xxxxxxxxxxxx Phone : +44 (0)116 2523548, Fax : +44 (0)116 2523555
