On Thu, 10 Sep 1998, David A. Tatum wrote:

Well... not quite true.  CNN reported about a month ago that there is the
POTENTIAL (though no actual cases) of such a virus existing in some old
e-mail programs (Microsoft came out with a patch to fix this in Outlook) by
writing 500 characters in the subject line and then the source code
afterwards (something about problems with buffers)...  Like I said, though,
this was a bug that was just discovered VERY recently, and apparently is
only known to be a problem (though there is the potential for the problem
to exist in other programs- Eudora, for instance, had yet to test theirs at
the time of the report) in Microsoft Outlook and Netscape Mail...

Sorry David, that is not a true virus. It is a bug in how some
e-mailprograms handle MIME extensions. The problem spans sversl platforms.
While one _could_ write a virus that takes advantage of the bug (basicaly
machine code that gets writen into memory beyond where the MIME header was
supposed to be) the computer has to at some point _run_ that code. As this
is essentialy in a random part of memory it is unlikely that the code will
ever get executed before the OS wipes that section of RAM.

As this topic has now degraded from FFML subject matter I recomend the
thread dies here or we go private mail. I will post no further to the list
on this thread.

 Lathrop Preston			lp0027@drake.edu
President Drake Anime Club	anime@alphawolf.ml.org