Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!gatech!purdue!decwrl!sun!imagen!atari!portal!cup.portal.com!
From: dan-hankins@cup.portal.com (Daniel B Hankins)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: The ultimate fix!!!
Message-ID: <10030@cup.portal.com>
Date: 14 Oct 88 04:20:53 GMT
References: <8810021843.AA10054@cory.Berkeley.EDU> <2757@sugar.uu.net>
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 33

In article <3599@s.cc.purdue.edu> ain@s.cc.purdue.edu (Pat-bob White)
writes:

>trojan horse, virus.. same word different pronouncation.

No.  No.  No.  No.  No.  No.  No.  No.  No.  No.  No.  No.  No.  No.  No.

The only similarities between Trojan horses and viruses are:

1. They both attack multiple systems.
2. They both tend to do bad things to systems on which they get control.

Their methods of attack and spread are completely different.

A virus is a piece of code that attaches itself to legitimate programs.  It
spreads by gaining control when the user runs an infected program and then
attaching itself to other legitimate programs.  It relies on users sharing
legitimate code or demonstrating legitimate code for each other in order to
propagate.  It may or may not do damage to the systems it spreads to
(viruses can be benign).

A Trojan Horse is a legitimate program that has been deliberately modified
by a human to contain a piece of code that implements a function outside
the advertised scope of the program.  Again this may be malicious (destroy
data, for instance) or benign (print out a cute little message once and
then get rid of itself).

Note that a traditional Trojan horse may be used as the initial vector for
a virus (that is, the unadvertised code inserted into the Trojan could be a
virus).


Dan Hankins