dg@titanium.mitre.org (02/11/91)
>Hi, all! > >I'm a reporter at the Middlesex News in Framingham, Mass. The new >governor here had some trouble getting his budget to the Legislature this >week, allegedly because of a virus, and I'd be most grateful if somebody >could help me out with a story. > >... > >Adam Gaffin Far cry from the Justice, eh? Observation number 1: Interferon is outdated. Many of the applications that are around now did not exist when Bob Woodhead first wrote Interferon. Furthermore, some of the applications that were around then (notably TOPS) caused Interferon to issue erroneous messages. The aide in question should be using the much more recent Disinfectant (freeware), SAM 2.0 (from Symantec), Virex (from HJC), or Rival (Microseeds I think). Observation 2: Mac viruses are not easier to write than PC viruses for the same reason Mac application are not easier to write than PC applications. Apple has a varied & well defined set out routines (together they comprise something called the Macintosh Toolbox) for things like opening and closing files, drawing windows on the screen, creating buttons and menu items and so on. There's a five volume, several hundred page tome devoted to documenting these routines! It is much easier to write viruses for DOS based systems (and I suspect Windows is included here) because DOS has a much simpler set routines available from the operating system. If I've confused you there, take a good look at the number of different viruses and strains of viruses that infect each platform. When I last checked (and this was awhile ago), there were some 5 different Mac viruses, with no more than five variations on a particular strain: total of about a dozen Mac viruses. At the time, the number of PC viruses numbered 23 distinct strains and over a 100 total viruses. Alot of has to do with the number of vandals writing viruses for the Mac vs. DOS, but it also has to do the relative ease with which viruses can be written for DOS vs. the Mac. Observation 3: The only way a virus can infect a clean system is (as you correctly surmised) someone has to bring an infected application on to the clean system. The infected application does not have to come from home though. There have been cases (mentioned here) where applications are bought off-the-shelf, shrink wrap intact, that are infected. This is a fundamental characteristic of all viruses, although some viruses are smart enough to use the facilities of the target machine's operating system to infect the machine without a specific application being run. They use facilities that are always "running" on the computer. Trivia: Former Gov. Dukakis is the only political figure to have a virus named for him. In the early days of the '88 Presidential campaign, a teenager in Florida wrote a virus that infected Hypercard stacks. The virus in question would flash a message "Dukakis in '88" or some-such. There is no connection between the young man and Dukakis or Dukakis' Presidential campaign. David Gursky