> I was of the understanding that those poor individuals using
> Micro$oft-supplied email-programs were suffering from the
> fact that said
> program (as of factory default) would execute attachments when
> opening the mail - without the user explicitly accessing the
> attachment?
Nope, not so. Any time the attachment has been run, it's because a user has
launched it.
The reason Outlook can be exploited to send mail like this is because it
provides more functionality than most mailers. If you use a bare-bones
mailer like (say) pine, the chances of having issues with this sort of virus
are smaller. Not, by any means, impossible -- it would be easy enough to
write a pine virus (executable-in-disguise, same as with Outlook; open
.pinerc, find the addressbook, open a socket, send mail out to everyone
containing your executable).
It's just easy to drive Outlook from code, and there are a _lot_ of Outlook
installs out there -- si that's why virus writers pick on it. There are
Eudora viruses in the world, you just don't hear about them because so few
people use Eudora..
-- dan
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