On 25 May 2011 at 17:14, Christopher Smith wrote: > I do make a distinction between viruses and other malware, because of > the way viruses can be distributed with very little action on the part > of the victims.
I don't think that's really the proper distinction. And I'm not certain what the definition of a virus would be. In the old days of floppy disk boot sector viruses, it was pretty easy to understand. Nowadays, the number of vectors and the type of exploits has greatly multiplied, and I don't think there's any simple delineation between the different types. The fact is, there are plenty of possible exploits out that can be run without user intervention because of unpatched vulnerabilities in all kinds of software. These "zero-day" exploits sound like what you are referring to with your definition above, but they still exist, and they are there for all platforms, including Windows, Mac and Linux. Fortunately, they are relatively hard to discover and generally require a lot of expertise to exploit for any useful purpose. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
