"Good Times" virus -- yes and no

[Narayan S. Raja]

On Fri, 9 Feb 1996 Bridgman at aol.com wrote:

> > There is no such thing. The "Good Times" "virus" is a hoax, or perhaps
> > more properly, it's sort of a meta-virus, in that the only virus-like
> > activity is the forwarding of the warning message, which sucks up network
> > bandwith, and e-mail disk space, because people "send it to all their
> > friends". It's basically a chain letter. If one should come your way, do
> > not send the "warning" to anyone, and educate the person who sent it to
> > you.
> >
> > This foolishness reared its ugly head a few years ago, but apparently
> > enough people have either forgotten it, or never heard of it, that it's
> > being successfully perpetrated again. Sigh...


While the "Good Times" virus itself is a
hoax, the concept is feasible -- it can 
happen right now.

This is because of the increasing use of
MIME-capable email readers, which automatically
popup a viewer program when you read an email
that has MIME attachments.  For example, if
your email program (MIME-capable) is configured
to automatically popup Microsoft Word when it
sees an email attachment in MS Word format,
and if that MS Word document has a "Macro" virus
(see 
http://www.microsoft.com/msoffice/freestuf/msword/download/mvtool/mvtool2.htm
for more info), you could end up automatically
executing a virus on your Mac or PC, simply by
reading your email.

Similar horrors are, of course, theoretically 
possible by executing a PostScript or Acrobat "program"
by automatically launching your PS or Acrobat
viewer program from your email reader.

As for "Java" attachments, the mind boggles.   :-)

Regards,


Raja.