A man of honour?

I found this tidbit on a government tech site:

http://www.govtech.net/magazine/chan...ory.php/104037

I just found the guy's name rather amusing :)

UK coverage of the story here:

http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/21...p-trojan-horse

Quote:

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users who clicked on the links were infected with a Trojan horse

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I can't resist. Maybe that should read "users of Microsoft Windows XP who
clicked on the links, etc. etc " Or did he mean "users who downloaded the EXE file
and installed it etc. How do you get a trojan from just clicking a link in your browser?
Isn't that a bit of an oversimplification? Usually these scams tell you you need a codec
and then you download it and install the trojan for them. Like yeah, every Pr0n film
needs its own custom codec, right?

As I see it, the user had to open something?

Although "drive bys" are certainly technically possible ;)

There are many examples of exploits that do NOT require user intervention in any way.

The entire point of service pack 2 for XP was to fix a lot of these bugs. One example I read was a certain graphics package had a bug where arbitrary code could be executed from a JPG file. There goes the idea that only binary files can carry a virus. I don't really remember the details unfortunately.