From: Alejandro Dubrovsky (s335984@student.uq.edu.au)
Date: Sat May 30 1998 - 13:12:54 MDT
On Fri, 29 May 1998, Michael Lorrey wrote:
>
> As far as I can tell, any time you put a CD in a drive, or any other
> disk in a drive, the drive checks the boot sector of the drive. This is
> how you can get a virus from an infected floppy simply by sticking the
> disk in the drive. You do not need to 'look at it' in order to give the
> virus a go at your system. Granted you could use a specially rigged CD
> copying machine, but these are expensive devices, not likely to be owned
> by the casual pirate. This cost of entry limits potential pirates to
> those with the capital to take the risk. Thus this limits the potential
> pirates, and eases enfocement.
>
the drive might read the boot sector of the disk, but it does not execute
it. AFAIK, you cannot get a virus simply by sticking the disk in the
drive, and even if you read data from the floppy you still cannot get the
boot record virii (unless, of course, you execute a program on the floppy
which contains the virus). The only way to get a boot sector virus,
outside executing an executable with a virus, is to boot from a floppy, in
which case the disk's boot sector gets loaded by the BIOS and executed.
This is the reason why boot sector virii are almost extincts since the
need to boot from floppy is extinct. Same as above holds for CDs.
Reading data cannot heart, executing it does.
chau
Alejandro Dubrovsky
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