Digital BW, The Print

Daniel Staver writes:

> Using a firewall is a good idea, but that is besides the point. What you
> said was that it's impossible for a virus to infect a computer without
> human interaction and that's not true.

One can configure a computer to welcome outside attacks, but that should
not be the default configuration.

> Even with a firewall it could still happen that a service on one of your
> open ports had a security hole in it and that a virus used that 
> vulnerability to infect your machine.

There aren't any open ports leading to any listening services on my desktop.

> Another example is the recent JPEG vulnerability recently discovered
> in windows which could leave you open to attack just by viwing a
> web-page with a JPEG image on it. I guess this could technically be
> decribed as user interaction, but viewing images online was previously
> thought to be safe behaviour even by security experts.

It still requires interaction, although this particular problem is
irritatingly pervasive.  C has been around for forty years or so; are
there still programmers so incompetent that they never check for buffer
overflows?