XRJDM@SCFVM.GSFC.NASA.GOV (Joe McMahon) (04/05/91)
I'd argue that Dukakis was/is a virus. Why? The program created copies of itself by infecting the Home stack script and them infecting the stack scripts of other stacks. From my point of view, this fulfills the qualifications of a virus - a self-reproducing program which uses other programs as hosts. A Trojan, on the other hand, is a program purporting to do one thing and actually doing another. The Dukakis virus actually stated within its source that it was a virus. I can't think of anything less like a Trojan - the program did act exactly as it claimed it would. I don't personally feel there's a "level of simplicity" below which a piece of code is too simple to be a virus. Just because the programming language used to write the virus is HyperTalk and not C or assembly language doesn't mean it can't act like a virus. It's just easier to detect and stop. --- Joe M.