[wplug] Windows - Is this happening to you too?

[John Harrold]

Sometime in May A. McCullough assaulted the keyboard and produced:

| Happening in Windows XP too.
| In fact, there's another new exploit - since Bill Gates decided to make Windows
| a giant web portal, so to speak. Any version of Windows that uses compiled help
| files (help files with a .chm extension) are open to attack on that front now -
| I've just spent two weeks cleaning out my significant other's WindowsXP box from
| a trojan that started with an unauthorized download of an innocuous file called
| "start.chm"; it allowed a .dll to download that constantly reset his browser's
| home page to a porn site. All he did was look at a web page (wasn't even the
| page he was trying to find) and all h#ll broke loose.

I'm sure that is what he told you ;)

| What worries me is that if Linux catches on to the extent Windows has,
| eventually the same thing will happen to Linux. Sooner or later there'll be some
| clever s.o.b. who'll figure out how to annoy the h*ll out of Linux users too.

One of the added benefits of having so many linux distros, is that it's
hard to make viri/worms/whatever that work on all platforms. You know, the
viri writers are going to have to make rpm's for suse, redhat, fedora,
mandrake, etc. Then they're going to have to make debian packages for
stable, testing and unstable.

Yes I'm just kidding, but in reality I think Linux is more secure by
design. I'm sure there will be issues like this for Linux in the future,
but I don't think it will be as serious in magnitude that the windows
security issues have prooven to be.

-- 
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                            | /"\                         
 john harrold               | \ / ASCII ribbon campaign   
 jmh at member.fsf.org      |  X  against HTML mail       
 the most useful idiot      | / \                         
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 What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, 
 and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is brought 
 under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of 
 liberty and democracy?
 --Gandhi
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