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A warning on a new destructive 'trojan horse'
Authored by: milk on May 12, '04 05:29:05PM

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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-- "An eye for an eye leaves us all blind." - Gandhi



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