I have googled the subject for a couple days now and still need more information or recources on Linux viruses. Can a virus that a windows computer carries infect a linux computer? Can a Linux virus damage a Windows PC? I thought that viruses could not affect *nix based OSs because of the way the file system is designed. please share any information and recources you have

thank you for your time.

There are the possibility to make viruses for any OS, regardless of design. Question is how easy it is or how many the give it a try.

The greatest chance of a virus destroying anything for another OS is on dual boot systems, since they share hardware. It can destroy but not infect the other OS, unless it's some kind of cross platform virus carrying several pay loads for a set of OS. For this to work it would need to first infect one of the OSes and inject a malicious code in the other OS, which would then be run on next boot to the second OS.

Viruses that spread and infect using the network, very popular these days, utilize a bug in the software. Since it uses bugs it is targeted for a specific OS/software.

Viruses from different os's are unlikely to infect each other, although they can damage each other (like in a dualboot). The damage of a virus should be minimal on *nix based os's because most of the files are read-only for regular users by default (assuming you don't often run as the root user).

A more general term used is mal-ware. This includes viruses, worms, trojan horses and spy-ware. In a networked environment, it is important to keep on top of installing security updates. An infected windows machine on the network may be designed to try various exploits, including against linux machines. It may report back to the hacker if it finds that your computer is vulnerable.

One of the main things I've seen regarding Windows viruses on Linux is infected windows boxes writing to a Linux Samba share. In fact that can be hard to diagnose, as you can clean all the Windows systems, but the Samba shares can act as vectors if viral code is stored there. The viral code itself is normally harmless to linux, so you don't see anything abnormal on the linux box.

Technically there actually is proof-of-concept code for viruses that can infect both linux and windows, but I think in reality you'll be hard presses to find an example of it in the wild (for now at least). IMO, those viruses kind of "cheat", by having two completely different subroutines on infection, one set of windows code and one for linux. So it's more like two viruses packaged together.

There are examples of windows viruses that carry two routines for infection for different windows versions w2k/XP. They have been picking randomly between the two when trying to infect a machine.

Wow thanks for the responses people!


So in this sense the samba share would simply be a place where other windows machines could get infected?

Would linux AVP pick up windows viruses?

Basically what I am asking with my second question is, In this senerio, the with the samba share would I disinfect the samba share from a MSbox like running anti virus on the share from my windows box ooooor removing the windows virus from the samba share in linux with linux AV software?

I hope I am not confusing anyone including myself.

I am still out looking for answers to my questions so I can post the info I find

Yes, you're right. In that case Samba will be just a place with inected files.
Linux antivir programs don't usually protect from Linux viruses (as their number is very low). They're used to scan mail, Samba shares and so on in search fro Windows viruses.

Hey, people can build multi-platform programs

why not multi-platform viruses,

viruses are programs , right???????

Yeah, but they work because there are a common base, like a java enginge.
They doesn't run on multiple platforms just like that, there are lots of work to implement this common library or interpreter. The library is different on different platforms and need to be installed first.

Viruses are program that do what they shouldn't be able to do. Because of that they have to find the weaknesses and bugs in their target host. Different OS has different bugs.