greenber@uunet.uu.net (08/03/89)
Programs such as Axe, which are stand alone decompressors, should not be considered an effective defense by any means angainst virus attacks. Consider a vanilla program, compressed and wrapped up in a decompress shell. Fine. Now, stick a virus around the shell (shell-within-a-shell). When you execute the program, the virus executes, then the decompressor starts to work. The checksum doesn;t match, so the system hangs, or aborts, or whatever. However the virus has already run.... (viruses such as the TSR Israeli Virus may not run, though, since the infected program is never really run if it crashes....) Ross Author, FLU_SHOT+