In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Einar Stefferud writes:
>
>The first of these "worm/virus/addressbookmailers" was the IBM PROFS
>"Chrismas Card" caper that occurred some time in the early 1990's,
>long before MS willfully adopted the design.
It was in December, 1987.
>
>Seems to me that this beloved "feature" (giving root privs to random
>EMail messages) should (by now) now be fully discredited, and should
>be destined for extinction, if only the customers will accept its
>disappearance in trade for an absence of a continuing flood of these
>$6,000,000,000 economic loss episodes.
See http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/5.80.html#subj1 for details on how
it worked -- but it didn't involve any analog to 'root' privileges.
When the recipient got a copy, there was an included (or attached; I
don't quite remember) REXX file. (REXX was a scripting language for VM/
CMS.) The message told you that it would display a Christmas card if
you ran it; most users did just that, since the note appeared to come
from someone they knew. And then the file replicated itself; you all
know the rest.
Note the two crucial points -- it ran with the user's permissions, and
it was explicitly run by the user, rather than by any automatic
mechanism.
--Steve Bellovin
