On Fri, Apr 29, 2005 at 03:01:44PM +0100, Nigel Wade wrote: > >You're using the word "manually" in a strange way, and differently from the > >way you did in the paragraph above. In this case, it didn't spread manually > >(in the normal sense of the word) from the infected mech binary to the > >binaries in /bin -- it did that on its own when it got a chance. > I'm not using it differently. In both cases I am considering spreading from > one system to another. This was done manually. Like I said, this is by definition the difference between a virus and a worm. But once on a system, viruses (including this one) *do* have mechanisms to spread automatically. > To infect the /bin binaries it required a user with root privilege to do > so. Most Windows viruses would have very limited threat capability if users > would stop running them with administrator rights. Yep -- and *if* people follow good practices on any OS (assuming the OS lets them do so in practice), viruses are a limited threat overall. But even that limited threat is a real threat that shouldn't be ignored -- *and* we need to do better to make it easier for non-technical users to follow best practices and still get work done. -- Matthew Miller mattdm@xxxxxxxxxx <http://www.mattdm.org/> Boston University Linux ------> <http://linux.bu.edu/> Current office temperature: 72 degrees Fahrenheit.
