[109587] in Cypherpunks
Re: Melissa won't be at the Mozilla.org party
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Frantz)
Tue Mar 30 12:23:26 1999
In-Reply-To: <3.0.5.32.19990329212717.00908660@idiom.com>
Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 08:24:35 -0700
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
From: Bill Frantz <frantz@netcom.com>
Reply-To: Bill Frantz <frantz@netcom.com>
What interests me most about Melissa is how similar it is to the virus
which took down the internal IBM Vnet network about 20-25 years ago. That
virus was called the "Christmas Card Virus".
In those days, IBM employees were in the habit of sending around programs
which made interesting displays on the terminals; snow flakes descending,
Santa Claus, etc. One enterprising IBM employee saw the opportunity to
increase the spread of his program by having it automatically send a copy
if itself to the people in the address book of anyone who ran the program.
My memory says the entire network was down for 2 days while the disinfected
it.
The major difference is that people now don't really think they are running
a program when they open a word processing document. Certainly Microsoft
hasn't provided any confinement for the macros, like the Java Applet
sandbox.
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Bill Frantz | Macintosh: Didn't do every-| Periwinkle -- Consulting
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