Faxed Virii?

[Let'sgoflying!]

Can a fax machine (or a computer that is faxing) transmit a virus to my computer via the phone line? I was thinking of hooking up the puter to the fax line in view of the continuing spam-faxes eating up all my printing resources. Is that a reasonable solution? Can I preview & discard faxes this way? Software needed or does WinXP already have?

 

[gismo]

Can a fax machine (or a computer that is faxing) transmit a virus to my computer via the phone line? I was thinking of hooking up the puter to the fax line in view of the continuing spam-faxes eating up all my printing resources. Is that a reasonable solution? Can I preview & discard faxes this way? Software needed or does WinXP already have?

Assuming that sending a fax from one computer to another uses the same transport protocols as a regular fax machine I'd say that it's perfectly safe, virus wise. Fax transmission via modem involves no mechanism to load memory or execute programs so there's no memory leaks to exploit or any other way to gain unauthorized control.

I suppose that an extremely poorly written fax program might allow the tiny bit of data sent on a fax call (sender & recipient IDs) to overwrite something if the transmitted field was longer than standard but that seems awfully unlikely.

 

[SCCutler]

No risk, Dave.

You should have software ("Fax Console") on your PC.