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Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.
Authored by: plambert on May 12, '04 02:03:03PM

There's nothing Apple can or should do. Aliasing 'rm' to 'rm -i' in your shell will only work if the person who writes the virus is kind enough to run your shell and let it load your aliases. They could write the commands in Applescript rather than using rm. They could write a C program to do it. This is all moot.

If you have the power to delete all of your own files, then any program you run has that power too. Nothing can change that. Trojan horses are nothing new, and nothing surprising. They are a problem on every platform, even Linux, and have nothing to do with the operating system or the computer.

There are companies that call people on the telephone and convince them to send them a check for $300 in return for a big-screen TV they'll never receive. This is made possible because (a) people can receive phone calls, and (b) people can give money to other people. No one suggests we remove telephones or checks from our lives to prevent such fraud.

Trojan horses are just the computer equivalent of fraud. They have been around for a very, very, very long time, and will be around until the end of time. Nothing can be done by Apple to prevent them, just as nothing can be done by Microsoft or any of the Linux distribution maintainers. It's just how life works: if you have a gun, and someone tricks you into shooting yourself in the foot, you've just shot yourself in the foot. It's not a flaw in the gun.

So how do you combat Trojan horses? Well, Trojan horses are not new. They date back to... yep! Troy!

Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.

The ancient adage still holds true today. Welcome a wooden horse full of soldiers into your city, and you're going to have a tough time blaming the manufacturer of the city wall for your city's subsequent downfall.



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Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.
Authored by: hisbonenus on May 12, '04 02:17:51PM

However, I would not want to be able to trash my entire home folder, with or without a virus. Is there not a way to have it ask for confirmation if a certain number of items are to be trashed at once?



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Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.
Authored by: etrepum on May 12, '04 02:32:09PM

No, because there are legitimate reasons to delete a lot of files, and in many cases those legitimate uses happen without user intervention (like deleting temporary files).

There are no technical solutions to social problems. Don't run programs you don't trust, or run them as a non-admin user that you don't care about (a "sandbox", if you will) until you do trust them. There is fast user switching, use it!



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Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.
Authored by: aranor on May 12, '04 02:39:21PM

That would be unwieldy and unproductive. Virus writers would just switch to deleting smaller blocks of files sequentially. You can't protect against this sort of thing, and any attempt will just make it harder to do things legitimately.



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Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.
Authored by: guet on May 12, '04 07:27:35PM

If you are worried about opening a particular application or even file.

Keep a spare limited user account arround (not admin), use fast user switching to switch to it, DISCONNECT FROM THE INTERNET, and run the application/script. That way it can't trash anything but the contents of that user account, and it can't send anything out over the wire.

Of course you really should try to limit the number of times you're opening files that you're not sure about... (ie from the internet).



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Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.
Authored by: kene on May 14, '04 09:00:21AM

Shouldn't that be 'beware of GEEKS bearing gifts' ?



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