"Samuel W. Heywood" wrote: > > On Tue, 25 Jun 2002 00:01:21 -0700 (Pacific Daylight Time), howard schwartz > wrote: > > <snip> > > > No we just have to worry and await the hackers figuring out how to > > make computers that display ascii characters run nasty executables - > > oh and be sure and remove that ansi driver from your dos setup files! > > This is the first news I have heard about ANSI being exploited for > use as some kind of virus helper. Can you point us to some more > info about this? The BBS nets had a problem with 'ANSI BOMBS' for a while. what the hacker did, was to insert ansi code to define a macro, (which might be to reformat the hard drive) and then use the ANSI code to assign that macro to a key.
But if you look at ANSI.com which I included in my text mode ebook demo, it has an option to disable key reassignment, and only process the video color codes. Then too, as you might imagine, it only took the BBS sysops a short time to come up with an ANSI screen filter, to identify the key reassignment command. And since the BBS system was run by individual hobbiests, they, for the sake of their own systems, tried to always identify posters and content contributors. The option of hiding the source of sabotage on a publically accessed terminal was not possible. I was slightly impressed at the time at the ingenuity, but saw as well that it was trivially easy to protect a system from that. Nobody reassigns keys as dos CLI commands anyway. There are plenty of more convenient ways to do things.
