Virus warning not so much a hoax

[Jon Knight]

On Mon, 3 Feb 1997, Alexander M Stroup wrote:
> > Please don't forward this on.  You CAN NOT get a virus from reading mail.
> > You MUST run an excutable to get a virus.  Mail is just plain text and
> > cannot be executed.
> 
> This part is no longer quite so true.  A new class of viruses has been
> born in the last year.  WordMacro viruses.  These viruses take advantage
> of Microsoft Word 6.x or 7.x's built in  macro language to spread
> themselves.

Ah, but Word files aren't plain text; they _are_ executables and have a
separate MIME type in the application/* heirarchy (not in text/* note).
Likewise you could be suitably nasty with PostScript documents as they too
are executables (though software such as Ghostscript does its best to
limit the damage they can do).  My advice is to be wary of attachments to
email that are anything other than text/plain.

Tatty bye,

Jim'll

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Jon "Jim'll" Knight, Researcher, Sysop and General Dogsbody, Dept. Computer
Studies, Loughborough University of Technology, Leics., ENGLAND.  LE11 3TU.
* I've found I now dream in Perl.  More worryingly, I enjoy those dreams. *