Path: utzoo!dciem!nrcaer!scs!spl1!laidbak!att!pacbell!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!ucbvax!dewey.soe.berkeley.edu!oster From: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu (David Phillip Oster) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: Re: Playboy virus - BEWARE! Message-ID: <24487@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> Date: 2 Jun 88 04:49:52 GMT Article-I.D.: ucbvax.24487 References: <258@uvabick.UUCP> Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Reply-To: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu.UUCP (David Phillip Oster) Organization: School of Education, UC-Berkeley Lines: 17 In article <258@uvabick.UUCP> thomas@uvabick.UUCP (Thomas Fruin) writes: >Through a dealer I heard that a new Macintosh virus had been sighted >here in the Netherlands, in Utrecht to be precise. It was called >Playboy or something similar, and after double clicking rapidly >started showing you pictures of benevolent nude girls, while it was >malevolently busy erasing your hard disk ... Let us be precise with our terminology here: 1.) a virus is a program that runs itself without human intervention, copying itself onto other programs, so that when they are run, the virus will continue to propogate. 2.) what you describe is an application, run explicitly by the user that does one thing, while secretly doing something else. This properly called a "trojan horse", or "trojan", which is particularly humorous in this case since "trojan" is also an American slang word for ...