cryptoanarchy.wiki

Arise, you have nothing to lose but your barbed wire fences!

1996-02-04 - Re: XMAS Exec

Header Data

From: dlv@bwalk.dm.com (Dr. Dimitri Vulis)
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Message Hash: 60c36c2594552ef36ac8bc976e7fe11ad67746b4cb912926efa80f8363df9742
Message ID: <ZwFsiD52w165w@bwalk.dm.com>
Reply To: <ol5DPvGMc50eR2cD0x@nsb.fv.com>
UTC Datetime: 1996-02-04 20:23:18 UTC
Raw Date: Mon, 5 Feb 1996 04:23:18 +0800

Raw message

From: dlv@bwalk.dm.com (Dr. Dimitri Vulis)
Date: Mon, 5 Feb 1996 04:23:18 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: XMAS Exec
In-Reply-To: <ol5DPvGMc50eR2cD0x@nsb.fv.com>
Message-ID: <ZwFsiD52w165w@bwalk.dm.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Nathaniel Borenstein <nsb@nsb.fv.com> writes:
> Dr. Dimitri Vulis@bwalk. (1227)
>
> > I'd like to take an exception to this description of the XMAS EXEC, since
> .............
> > I had serious doubts that the person who wrote it was malicious.
>
> Agreed completely.  I didn't mean to imply that the author was
> malicious, merely that it well-illustrated the "social engineering"
> approach to getting users to run untrusted code.  What I was saying is
> that someone who *was* malicious could have used the same approach as
> the attack vector for getting our credit card snooper (or other nasty
> code) onto lots of consumer machines.  This came up, in the discussion,
> because most people on this list seem to believe (correctly, I think)
> that the hardest part of the attack we outlined is the initial infection
> vector.  -- Nathanielx

In '87, many people received an unsolicited executable from a known source, and
ran it without thinking twice. (If A has B's address in his nickname file, then
B probably knows and trusts A to some extent.) I hope users today know better.

I don't see why stopping a keyboard sniffer is any harder than stopping any
other virus/trojan - and most shops manage to keep them out.

---

Dr. Dimitri Vulis
Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps

Thread