Got this off Chester’s when looking through my RSS feeds.
There was a fracas recently about ping.sg having a virus and ping’s owner insistent statement that “You cannot get a virus from a URL.”
So much for that. He means that he cannot get a virus from a URL. The rest of us mere mortals don’t bother patching every single vulnerability update.
I am not sure how the malware installed on Chester’s system and I can only guess this happened because he was using IE.
It is however true – based on my understanding, and that of a few colleagues in the office – that there is no way one can get a virus from a Universal Resource Locator (URL for short). An URL is nothing more than an address, and if there’s a bunch of crooks at a particular address, it won’t harm you when you just look at the address or read it out loud. However, if you send an invitation to that address and invite them over for a party, then there might be some trouble.
So, this is what happens when you put that URL into your browser (or click on a link): The computer will now access the server containing the resources specified by the URL and download whatever necessary onto your computer. This is done so that the computing power of your system can be utilised to execute the code on your end, and the server will be free to perform other tasks. (In a way, the cyber-equivalent inviting people to come over for a party and they are given permission to do certain things.)
After the contents are downloaded onto your computer, certain codes will be executed, so it will display the way it is intended on your system. In the perfect world, these codes execute in a sandbox environment where they are unable to access the rest of your computer. Sort of like the White House throwing a party and yet the invited guest would not be given access to the Oval Office.
Unfortunately, where Internet Explorer is concerned, thanks to a little nicety called ActiveX, not only do some these code sometimes execute without your intervention, regardless if your patches are up to date or not, they are allowed to access other parts of your computer. This usually happens when the security settings in Internet Explorer are set too low but there are so much holes in ActiveX that collectively you can fly even fly the Death Star through it. But in simple layman terms, that means the guests are allowed to venture out of a controlled area to places they should never be allowed to go to.
So, as long as ActiveX remains an integral component of Internet Explorer, ‘self install’ malware will remain an un-escapable evil when surfing, and no matter how up to date your patching is, it will not stop that evil. And once it gets in behind the defenses, then it’s a different ball game entirely. But still, an URL on it’s own will never infect your system with a virus.
However, my understanding of this could be a little outdated and things might have changed recently. So I have switched to Opera or Firefox which at least are more secured. And when even MSN Live Mail only launch the ‘Classic’ Version in Opera, I do feel little safer.
