I am killing this thread. While many have pointed out the fact that if you can place a file in an area were a user may eventually be able to find it and open it (e.g. by double clicking on it) the game is almost over anyway, I feel that the most subtle point is being lost. In the graphical user interface environment with the desktop metaphor that most users have learned the user has been trained, whether right or wrong, that a file's icon has some bearing on the file's type and thus on the types of actions that are considered safe to perform on those files. Yet this is a false assumption. Its all too easy to change a file's icon and choose one more innocuous. Similarly, files that most users believe to be innocuous (e.g. a .url or .lnk), can actually contain malicious executable content. These problems are exacerbated by the fact that is has become all to easy to link to networked content (e.g. UNC paths, URLs) and to map it seamlessly into the local machine's file system space. To the point the users can no longer distinguish between local content and remote content and cannot make a clear determination as to what is trusted and what is not. Obviously part of the solution is simply user education. Another one can be the use and extension of mechanisms such as Microsoft's Security Zones beyond web content and applied to the file system (local and otherwise). -- Elias Levy SecurityFocus.com http://www.securityfocus.com/ Si vis pacem, para bellum
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