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Worms and Scripts

Worms use email clients to travel from system to system. For travel, and sometimes for doing damage they use one of the common scripting languages. The probably most spread (though not most used) and thus most "dangerous" scripting language is Visual Basic Script. Files for this language have an extension of ".vbs". Another popular languages is JavaScript ("js").

It is not necessarily any feature in one of the scripting languages or even a security hole that makes them so dangerous. It is rather that such scripts can be run in the background. You open an email message, do nothing, close it again -- and you have just spread a worm.

Because such scripts run in the background automatically there is no way to interfere with their action (except for killing their process or shutting down the system maybe).

Script Defender

What would be necessary for us to regain control over the scripts that run on our system? It could be as simple as a dialog that appears every time a script wants to be executed asking us whether we want that to happen.

This is exactly what the Analog X Script Defender does. It installs interceptions for the most prominent script language file extensions. The list of file extensions is editable, though, so you can remove any of them or add new extensions as needed.

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Once the intercepts are installed, a warning window is brought up every time a file with one of the selected file extensions is run. Here, you can choose between executing the script and aborting the execution before it has started.

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"The umbrageous Oak, in pomp outspread
Full oft, when storms the welkin rend,
Draws lightning down upon the head
It promised to defend."

William Wordsworth