Tuesday, January 17, 2006

what is a program?

this is going to be a non-obvious answer - a program is a collection of instructions meant to be executed or interpreted by the computer for the purpose of carrying out a task...

to that end - *.exe files are programs, but so are the macros in word/excel/powerpoint documents... so are bootsectors... so are batch files... so are the javascripts embedded in web pages... so are windows meta files (*.wmf)... so are a whole host of other things that the average person would probably not have considered a program...

so many of the things are programs, in fact, that it's easier to just say everything other than a few well known exceptions are programs and therefore everything except those few well known exceptions are potential threats... in fact, even those few well known exceptions could be also be threats given the right nefarious modifications to a standard operating environment...

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