Thread: Viruses on OS X
View Single Post
  #14  
Old February 27th, 2005, 06:34 PM
fryke's Avatar
fryke fryke is offline
Super Moderator
 
Join Date: Sep 2000
Location: macosx.com
Posts: 13,149
Thanks: 2
Thanked 12 Times in 12 Posts
fryke has a spectacular aura aboutfryke has a spectacular aura about
Quote:
Originally Posted by ElDiabloConCaca
For VPC to infect a Macintosh outside of the VPC Shared Folder, the virus would have to be specifically written to handle UNIX-style directories -- something that Windows virii are not written to do. The first time that virus tried to "backslash" its way into another directory, it would fail. The Macintosh, outside of the Shared Directory, is completely inaccessible to any Windows virus.
Not true. The Windows virus might attack a path with \ in it, but that's automatically parsed by VPC to /. So actually the virus running in VPC can attact all the files under the path shared to VPC. If you're dumb enough to let VPC access the root of your Mac OS X file system, the virus can, theoretically, delete any file VPC has the right to delete. While this is far less dangerous than a 'real' Mac OS X virus/rootkit combo, it's still a drag.

However, I don't think people are likely to share folders they don't really want to share.
__________________
MacBook Air 13" 1.6 GHz, 2 GB RAM, 80 GB HD. Mac OS X 10.5.5
MacBook 13" 1.83 GHz, 2 GB RAM, 160 GB HD. Mac OS X 10.5.5
Hackintosh Core2Duo 2.4 GHz, 2 GB RAM, 160 GB HD. Mac OS X 10.5.5
iPhone 3G 16 GB (v2.1), AppleTV 1G 40 GB (v2.1)

Mac user since 1987, Apple Product Professional 2007, 2008.
Reply With Quote