 Re: next genera virus - vista
"Hehe, one more question, is it possible for a virus to delete files in another drive, or infect a data drive and re-infect back to the Os drive?"
This is a complicated question actually. Vista makes it less likely. What a virus can do depends on how it is activated and the permissions it gets. If it's activated with administrator privileges, it's possible for a virus to do almost anything especially when it was running as a service as this one was.
Yes, viuses can create files and caches, modify files with copies of themselves and some viruses are polymorphic meaning that they establish thmelves with multiple names on a system. Often a virus will have cooperating images so that if one is deleted it will be replaced. Some viruses and malware are "quiet viruses" they aren't all that visible and they just quietly gather intelligence on your system and relay that data beack to some site. They also have acted as gateways for people to take control of a system or to open windows for other viruses.
Vista will go a long way to thwart these because many viruses are built to under the XP file structure which has been largely redone on vista. But as I discovered, new ones are being written all the time. It is not at all safe to assue that a virus will attack only the system disk because a virus can simply ask for a list of drives. If one wanted to write a truly destructive virus, the safest thing for a virus to do would be to start deleting files on other disks or partitions first and then to attack the OS disk because it's most likely to be caught there.
thnks |