[SWLUG] thoughts on mydoom

[Bryn Reeves]

Hi all,
<rant>
My thoughts on this are that, although mydoom relies on 'social
engineering' rather than exploiting a security flaw in the mail client, it
is still *much* too easy to start executing foreign binaries with elevated
privilages on a windows/office/outlook platform. 

Why exactly do people need executable binary attachments anyway? I cannot
think of a single 'killer app' for this (for me, flash-ized, interactive
christmas cards just don't do it). If someone really, really needs to send
me an executable I'd quite like my mail client to force me to save it, and
the OS to force me to 'chmod +x' it before I run it, just to make sure I
really wanted to.

I use mutt, which forces this behavior on me (I'm sure it could be
persuaded to auto-run binary attachments, but I'd rather it didn't). I
don't use a *nix based graphical email client but I understand mozilla
mail/thunderbird and kmail both make running attachments much harder. 

I guess the fact that it is so easy to do on windows is a reflection of the
'percieved convenience above all' culture which seems to go with most
Microsoft apps. 

</rant> :-)

Cheers

B.