Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!amdahl!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!DOCKMASTER.ARPA!TMPLee
From: TMPLee@DOCKMASTER.ARPA
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple
Subject: A+ Virus Article (mostly for Morgan Davis)
Message-ID: <890311042116.386814@DOCKMASTER.ARPA>
Date: 11 Mar 89 04:21:00 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
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As a professional in the computer security game I'd like to publicly
complement Morgan Davis on his article in the recent A+ on viruses.  It
is both well-written and technically accurate.  I do not believe it
over-sensationalizes the problem or the risks.  (The situation is
actually somewhat worse than the tone of his article, despite the
closing paragraph, would lead you to believe -- NONE of the existing
defensive programs would be a match for any reasonbly clever person
seriously intent on doing as much damage as he could.)

(I have one minor quibble about the article:  it says that an Applesoft
program can't be the source of a virus.  Not true -- who knows what's
buried in the machine code most complex Applesoft programs poke into
memory from DATA statements?  And, for that matter, if I even just had a
20,000 line applesoft program in front of me I wouldn't know what it was
doing anyway, DATA statements, peeks and pokes or not.)

Given the situation it bothers me tremendously that there still isn't a
good hard disk backup program for ProDos.  Neither the package in ProSel
nor the one from Quality Computers (I forget the title) does incremental
backups, which is the only feasible way to deal with a reasonable size
hard drive, and BackUpII from Apple seems to have some fatal bugs that
make it impossible (for me at least) to use.

TMPLee@Dockmaster.arpa