full-disclosure - Viral infection via Serial Cable

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Message-ID: <200409011152.i81BqL95009406@turing-police.cc.vt.edu>
From: Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu (Valdis.Kletnieks@...edu)
Subject: Viral infection via Serial Cable 

On Mon, 30 Aug 2004 16:32:01 EDT, =?ISO-8859-1?Q?=DCber_GuidoZ?= said:

> The same reason there are so many Windows viruses... 90 something % of
> the people online are using Windows, that's thats what the viruses are
> after. Back in the day when serial connections were the only means of
> communication possible, viruses weren't very possible

Actually, at the time, downloading an infected file from a BBS was one of the
*major* ways that viruses propagated.  They were quite possible, and a real
problem even back then (you think it's hard now, think how much fun it was
getting something off your system when it knew how to infect the boot sector of
your recovery floppy, and there weren't any good A/V tools yet..).

The malware just didn't spread worldwide in 2 hour's time because not everybody
called the BBS at once.  Of course, the "damn, there's a virus" notifications
also didn't spread that fast for the exact same reasons....

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