Date: Fri, 21 Apr 95 09:06:48 EDT
From: den AT aisinc DOT com (Dave New)
To: BILLC AT teleng1 DOT tait DOT co DOT nz, matt AT whcomprm DOT jcu DOT edu DOT au
Subject: Re: Internet Virus Alert
Cc: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu, leis AT usq DOT edu DOT au, d DOT edwards AT eas DOT gu DOT edu DOT au,
        76247 DOT 3453 AT compuserve DOT com

The only circumstance I know of where reading a message potentially did
destructive things to a computer is the case where someone has the ANSI.SYS
(or similar) loaded on their PC under DOS, which allows non-printing escape
sequences to re-map the keyboard.  Thus, reading a file to console would
change, for instance, the return key to send del *.* or some such silliness.

There are programs that will scan text files for you looking for imbedded
suspicious ANSI escape sequences.

I'm not aware of any sensitivities of this sort in Un*x-type mail readers, but
I suppose that such things could exist.

Macs, I am told, have an achille's heal where just placing a diskette in a drive
can transfer a virus because the system actually goes out to a system area on
the diskette and runs some code to mount the diskette.  What silliness.  At
least the only time a PC attempts to execute code from a diskette is if you
attempt to boot from it, or purposefully load a program from it into memory and
run it.

All in all, the "Good Times" message sound rather improbable, but useful
nevertheless, to keep folks awake.  We lull ourselves into thinking that
nothing will attack *my* system.  Best defense is good backups.  You do
have a recent tape backup of your system, don't you? 8-)

DaveN