0003158580@mcimail.com (William Hugh Murray) (06/19/91)
>Of course I don't do much with shareware or BBS downloading which is >where I imagine most of the problems are. Along with many others, you imagine an untruth. Both PC and Mac viruses spread by sharing of machines and diskettes. They might have been spread by BBSs but they have not been. They might have been spread by shareware, but they have not been. Regular readers of this forum are aware of this, but it bears re-stating, particularly in the face of specualtion to the contrary. The most successful viruses infect boot sectors of diskettes, partition tables or boot sectors of hard drives, and go resident, i.e., they are TSRs. They spread when users permit strange diskettes to be inserted in their machines, or when they put their diskettes in machines that they did not themselves boot from a known source. While they can and do spread marginally in other ways, this high-risk behavior accounts for their current success.