Follow up: How to write a Linux virus Feb 12, 2009, 07 :31 UTC (11 Talkback[s]) (8073 reads)
"Commenter Burninator discovered that you don't even need the .desktop ending in the attachment. The Gnome and KDE desktops actually read the file, and don't base their decision to special-case the file on the file-name extension! So, the critical meta data here (make this something that can be executed) is NOT encoded in the filename, as some have suggested, it is actually derived by reading the first line of the file contents. So, in that respect the desktop environments are not quite as hapless as some had indicated and are not just making the same mistake as Windows has.
"On the flip-side of that same discovery: You can make your attachment now even less suspicious looking. Rather than naming it something like some_text.odt.desktop, you only need to name it some_text. That has two nice side effects: Firstly, email clients will now never know what to do with the file (no useful extension) and are more likely to prompt the user to save the file to disk. Thus, you don't need to get the user to explicitly do that anymore by putting proper wording in your email."
