On Wed, 3 Sep 2003 22:38:56 -0400 "Bob S." <usr@sanctum.com> wrote:
On Wednesday 03 September 2003 07:18, zentara wrote:
On Tue, 2 Sep 2003 22:26:16 +0100
The biggest danger is if you have a dual boot with windows and linux. If you boot into windows, and it finds and runs a virus, it can damage anything on your disk. If the linux kernel isn't running, your linux system isn't protected.
Whoa !! Are you saying that in a dual boot system a windows virus can infect the Linux partitions? Windows doesn't even know that Linux is there and they are different filesytems, FAT32 vs ext3. Mine are even on different hard drives.
Please tell us a little more. My Win 98 system is a mess, no virus protection, nothing, and don't really care. Only keep it to run a few games and some Flight Planning software.
I'm sorry to dissapoint you, but you can have some real damage done by the windows kernel running. It may not know how to read ext3 but it knows something is there. Just do an fdisk in windows.....do the linux partitions show up as "unknown" or "not there". Sadly a virus can be written to do anything anywhere on the disk, only if the linux kernel is running, will it observer "permissions" and the programs right to write to some area of the disk. Windows observes no permissions. So a windows virus can say write a bunch of 1's at some place where the ext3 filesystem is. Then you get file corruption, and if it targets the boot area, you may not be able to boot. Also, you know not to run "defrag" in windows, when you have a dual boot with linux. Many a linux system has been messed up by defrag. It's also becoming possible, for very clever trojans to be introduced into linux, from running windows. Say for instance, a clever windows hacker wrote a virus which scanned linux partitions for libc.so.6 and modified it somehow. Then everytime you ran a program back in linux, you could be spreading something injected by windows. The lesson? Do not have dual boots with windows, if you need security. Dual boots are risky business. -- I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth.