[PLUG] Mandriva And Mandriva...

[Pranav Peshwe]

On Sun, Aug 24, 2008 at 9:31 PM, Aditya Laghate <laghatea at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, 2008-08-24 at 20:51 +0530, Arun Khan wrote:
> > On Sunday 24 Aug 2008, म.हा.सा.ग.र wrote:
> >   When I inserted his USB pen drive on my Ubuntu
> > 8.04.1 I noticed a lot of <dir>.exe files created on my hard disk.
> > Obviously, the pen drive was infected but worse yet the virus was able
> > to create the files on my system.  Luckily the damage was contained
> > since the .exe files could not run on my system.  I disabled "auto run"
> > in Nautilus.  Ease of use has it's down side.
>
> This is funny!! I have till date (in the last 10 years) never seen a
> virus file replicating on Linux!! Are you sure it came from the
> pen-drive and not were already present??
>
> Because, by logic and theory, the executable on the pen-drive CANNOT
> execute on Linux. A windows executable CANNOT run on Linux.
>

True, a MS PE won't run on the linux kernel natively, but with WINE, it
certainly can run. IIRC, with WINE installed, one can click-n-run an exe as
if it was a linux binary. The exes have proper access to the filesystem and,
can change things outside the .wine directory too. An infected exe might be
able to spread itself as Arun says.
The last thing one would want to do is, login to the GUI as root!

Corrections welcome...

Best regards,
Pranav