From: Eugene Leitl (Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Date: Fri Jul 27 2001 - 04:32:52 MDT
On Thu, 26 Jul 2001, Harvey Newstrom wrote:
> I would think that your binary would be infected on your PC before you
> make the decision to send it as an attachment or put it on a webpage.
Current viruses propagate via email attachements. They send themselves out
to anybody in one's addressbook, or even email addresses in a web cache.
They don't send out invitiations to click on a link, they come verbatim,
because the infection threshold is lower.
The virus makes the decision to send itself out, not you.
> The chances of you catching it would be the same. If it is infected,
No. If I have sufficient clue to use URLs to docs instead of sending out
attachments, the probability of me having a virus is considerably lower
than of the average ijit.
Rejecting anything executable in an attachment is a good protection
against those who haven't wised up yet, and are still running Microsoft
Outlook.
The virus problem is 99.8% based on lack of clue. The worm problem is of
similiar nature: it is trivial to write code immune to buffer overruns if
you use appropriate languages.
> both the mail route and the web route will both deliver the same
> infected file. Unless you are thinking that e-mail might become
> infected as it passes through other people's mail systems, while web
> would be more direct.
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