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A warning on a new destructive 'trojan horse'
Authored by: candid on May 13, '04 04:02:47AM

The clou of a trojan horse is that it pretends to be something good but does something bad. An unexperienced user will not notice that and doubleclick the file. But even an experienced user might overlook something.

The best protection would be to give users a way of knowing who is the originator of a file or what the file does.

Would it be possible for Apple or a software developer to provide a sort of "file analyzer" which does analzye a file prior to opening it, to determine what the file contains, and if it contains executable code to give the user a summary of what it does?

I.e. "The file you just opened contains a program which scans folders in your home directory and makes modifications to files contained in them. Do you still want to open this file?"

I don't know if it is possible to program such a clever analyzer. But there could be a way of putting the knowledge which experienced users have to help them determine if a file could be a trojan into such a file analyzer.



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