Y301E05@AWITUW01.BITNET (04/11/91)
I can only provide an answer for Macs. It is possible, and in fact there is a virus called "WDEF" which uses this method. This virus infects the invisible Desktop file which resides on every floppy and hard disk. This file is examined by the Finder when the floppy is mounted and the virus resource gets loaded into memory. On the other hand there are a lot of anti virus tools (commercial and free) which address this problem an wipe out all known viruses that use this method. One of them (called SAM Intercept) can be configureds to scan every floppy that is inserted into the Mac, and will give you an alert and the option to kill the virus. Since the invisible Desktop file will not be used in System 7.0, i can+t say, if viruses will be able to infect Macs running with System 7.0. I hope this helps Stephan Bublava y301e05@awituw01.bitnet
CANDERSO@uga.cc.uga.edu (Christopher T. Anderson) (04/11/91)
Yes,
On the macintosh, WDEF spreads quite nicely on insertion of a floppy. Any
virus which infects the desktop file will likely infect on disk insertion.
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