On 15 Nov 1998, Harald Milz wrote:
> Ford Prefect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > There's a reported *NIX "virus" of olden days, which was very cleverly
> > written. It was encapsulated into the "login" program, so when a certain
> > user logged in, it gave them root access, whether or not they actually had
>
> This is what is usually called a Trojan Horse. A virus is something
> entirely different.
It's more than a trojan, because of the way the compiler is doctored. The
compiler passes the code on to the login program whenver it detects that it's
compiling login. The code reponsible for this behavior is not visible in the
source code of the compiler; when the compiler binary is run to compile its own
source code, it detects that and adds it to the binary code of the resulting
compiler image.
This is far more clever than your typical virus, but then again, Ken Thompson
is not your typical hacker. :)
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