dmg@lid.mitre.org (David Gursky) (11/23/89)
In Virus-L V2 #247, Fridrick Skulason (frisk@rhi.hi.is) asks about viruses written in higher-level languages. An oft ignored fact of HLL viruses is that some do have the ability to spread between machines running the same HLL. For example, Smalltalk-80 operates on Macs, PS/2s, and 286 based PCs. Now suppose I write a virus that is written in Smalltalk-80. It will not infect, say, the System file on a Mac, or the .COM files on PCs, but it could spread from Smalltalk-80 Mac to Smalltalk-80 286. A precursor to this was the Dukakis Virus of last year. The Dukakis virus was written in Hyperscript, the programming language behind Apple written in Hyperscript, the programming language behind Apple's Hypercard product. We are seeing Hypercard compatible products for MS-DOS (Spinnaker's Plus product for the Mac and PC -- See MacWeek 21-Nov). Consequently, Dukakis type viruses could pose threats to both Macs and PCs, although only to a subgroup of those platforms (those running the infectable application).