[109588] in Cypherpunks
RE: Re: Melissa won't be at the Mozilla.org party
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Brown, R Ken)
Tue Mar 30 12:41:25 1999
From: "Brown, R Ken" <brownrk1@texaco.com>
To: "'cypherpunks@ssz.com'" <cypherpunks@einstein.ssz.com>,
cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 11:25:43 -0600
Reply-To: "Brown, R Ken" <brownrk1@texaco.com>
The Christmas Tree wasn't 25 years ago - it can't be much more than 10 or
12 years. I saw it - I was a VM system programmer at the time which was my
job from about 1986 to 1992. Very roughly contemporary with the Great
Internet Worm. It "got out" in a couple of places, including I think some
German universities.
It was a Profs mail message with, IIRC, a Rexx program attached which had to
be explicitly run from the command line - it just did an ASCII at Christmas
Tree & mailed itself to people in your nickname list. Trivial to code in
Rexx (one of IBM's better moves) but not really a "virus". I don't think it
was in the slightest bit malicious.
Ken
> From: Bill Frantz [mailto: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.
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> -----------
> Bill Frantz | Macintosh: Didn't do every-| Periwinkle
> -- Consulting
> (408)356-8506 | thing right, but did know | 16345 Englewood Ave.
> frantz@netcom.com | the century would end. | Los Gatos,
> CA 95032, USA
>
>
