Path: utzoo!yunexus!geac!syntron!jtsv16!uunet!portal!cup.portal.com!dan-hankins
From: dan-hankins@cup.portal.com
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: The ultimate fix!!!
Message-ID: <9932@cup.portal.com>
Date: 10 Oct 88 22:28:50 GMT
Article-I.D.: cup.9932
References: <8810092209.AA09182@cory.Berkeley.EDU>
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 18
XPortal-User-Id: 1.1001.5361

What protection the UNIX community has against viruses does *not* stem from
memory protection.  That is trivial for a virus to passively evade.  What
protection it has comes from the fact that UNIX has been ported to so many
incompatible machine architectures.

And it *is* possible to infect source.  I would bet that less than one tenth
of one percent of the UNIX users out there carefully inspect source code
before compiling.  And as I noted in a previous posting, it is indeed possible
to infect .c *source* files.  When compiled on whatever machine, they then
(upon execution of the object) infect whatever other .c files they can find.

One of the primary characteristics of viruses is that the traditional
protection mechanisms designed to keep users away from other users' data
(file protection, memory protection, logon passwords, etc.) are of little or
no use.


Dan Hankins