Opening a windows virus in Mac OS X.. advice please..

[danbroad]

Hi folks, and some advice please..

owing to a remarkable coincidence [A fake US customs email when I'm expecting a real US customs email...], I downloaded a zip file with Safari, which turned out to contain a [Windows] .exe file. I'm pretty vigilant on the web, and recognising that this was a virus, I moved it straight to the trash. However, as I've got my multi-touch set up pretty lightly, I managed to double-click it rather than 'click and move it' to the trash...

So, anyway, up opens a textedit file with code.. the usual virus stuff for Windows, I assume, starting with a Shell32 instruction...

I promptly moved it over to the trash, and had a smug chuckle that the worst an .exe virus can do in Leopard is open up a textedit box.....

But I have boot camp installed on the MBP, and although it wasn't running, the Windows volume is visible on my OSX desktop. Will the physical act of opening a virus executable in Leopard, without any windows programs running, potentially install on my partitioned Windows drive?

If so, then do I need to install and run antivirus software on my windows partition? [as I'm particular about never using windows to access the web, and only use it for gaming...]

 

[Will_3rd]

You should be fine, as you haven't run it inside Windows and .exe's don't execute under Mac OS X you probably don't have anything to worry about.

 

[danbroad]

thanks, it's as I thought. Still going to ClamXAV just to be sure.... but it's good to know that I can carelessly open a virus without damage to the OS...!

 

[Una]

Yeah it wont do anything. OSX does not have the ability to execute windows PE file format (.exes/.coms etc..).

 

[Dracata]

Sure this has been posted, but i'll answer anyway, you'll be fun, you have to 'execute' the file, which you obviously can't do that under Leopard which is a completely different platform and can't run Windows executables.