> Page 99 of the September edition of Australian PC User magazine has a
> disturbing, if true, note on a virus that has been developed for
> inserting in a JPEG image file.
This is essentially a hoax resulting from speculation by one of the
antivirus companies (in my cynical opinion, to drum up more business.)
The original claim was that a "virus" installed on the computer that is
harmless in itself could execute dangerous code hidden in a JPEG image.
This in itself is reasonable, though the "sleeper" program should be
detectable by antivirus software in the same way as other "harmless"
viruses etc.
However, they went on to speculate that an infected JPEG image itself
could infect a computer and spread. The expert opinion is that this
is not feasible, unless future programs are written to do really dumb
things like blindly running executable code in documents. Given the
backlash caused by Outlook Express doing similarly dumb things with
mail attachments (and the numerous security patches to try and fix it),
I doubt anyone would want to do this.
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Paul Taylor Veni, vidi, tici -
I came, I saw, I ticked.
Birding-Aus is on the Web at
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