I am really annoyed. I hate
e-mail worms.
The-email-worm-of-the-week is SirCam. You have probably seen it, it's the one that has some text like
I send you this file in order to have your advice
and the attachment that's in the e-mail is some random file from the sender's computer, plus the
virus, of course.
I can't really blame the infected people. Usuaully, they are just middle managment or simple home owners that don't know anything about computers. I can blame the software designers. Why did they ever add scripting to e-mail documents? Do you know, I've never actually seen that used, ever, in a legit way? Only ever seen it used in worms and virii. Anyway, I don't really blame the software designers. I blame the person who wrote the virus.
So this got me to thinking. Why don't I write a reverse-virus that spreads in the same way? This virus will work like this:
Send itself out to all the people on the recipient's address book
Edit the Registry to disable scripting in Outlook
Possibly install a small pop-up that warns users whenever they open a file from Outlook
After that, the "infected" machine will not be able to propagate these kind of virii anymore. Of course, this won't stop Windows e-mail worms. I can think of a dozen ways to write new ones. But you know what? I'm not going to write the thing. I'm just too lazy. And it's dangerous to let something like that loose, since you can't always predict what's going to happen. Also, no matter how small I make the thing, it's still gonna affect network bandwidth for the ISPs SMTP servers. (Though, if I got the whole thing into 5K, I don't think they'd really notice).
So that's why I'm annoyed. I can see the problem, and I can see a short-term solution. But nothing is going to change. As long as there are idiots willing to spend time to write virii, there are going to be victims.
I wonder if there's any education programs that discourage writing malicious code? I doubt it.