A good thing about having AV software installed on Linux is that, when you have infectable files that have come from Windows, you can scan them in Linux without risking inadvertently running any possible viruses that may be lurking on your Windows system - so it's still a good idea in my book if you also use Windows system's (especially other people's Windows system's).

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thats a one of my main reasons to use AV.

this is my scan result from my fedora box, target were windows 10 64bit.

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Same here, as I still use Windows on other people's machines from time to time, and I'd never presume a Windows machine is malware-free.

Looks like you picked up an old virus (fragment), boot sector virus too.
https://www.sophos.com/en-us/threat-...0Empire-h.aspx

It just goes to show, you never know what might be out there. If Sophos AV can pick up a Windows virus that old, it'll likely be able to pick up the very latest viruses/malware - so it must be pretty good.

I should scan my USB stick just in case

i just deleted .sys files and scanned master boot records. nothing were found after that.
... but i dont believe its a clean system, might have to reinstall, PITA

If my memory serves me correctly that virus you found was in pagefile.sys that Windows uses for virtual memory paging. So it would be interesting to know how it ended up there. It would suggest that you have something else that's been infected with the same virus, and given you didn't find other traces of it, perhaps something you have on a USB or other removable media somewhere?

I tried to find out more about that particular virus, but other than the link I posted before, there doesn't seem to be a lot of info about it (probably because of how old it is) - other than it's a "MBR virus". So it would be interesting to know what it does, beyond infecting the MBR of course.

yes, i am worried about that also, how safe would it be to scan usb sticks using my linux box?

I'd say as safe as it would be scanning your Windows partition from Linux - as long as you don't boot your system from the USB's in question, or run any programs that you might have on them, then I can't see how you would inadvertently run any viruses/malware that might be lurking on them. Therefore Linux would be immune from anything that might be there - particularly if anything that might be lurking there are Windows programs.

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didnt find any infected objects / mbr's on my sticks.

i am going to boot into windows, exit and rescan from linux.

done all that^

and rescan didnt find anything on my windows installation.
i am thinking that this could have been false positive, at least i hope so.