On Feb 26, 2010, at 11:43 AM, Jonas Lopez wrote:
Will a suspected infection virus be able to enter my Ethernet
connection - notice this does NOT ask the question of entering the
other box, just the Ethernet connection - keeping in mind the
reasoning here: since Ethernet IS THE SAME FOR ALL MACHINES, and IF
I happen to be so un lucky as to have one of them on the suspected
machine, it could go into my Ethernet via this connection - this is
the question?
No. "ethernet" is not capable of getting a computer virus.
A computer virus is just a program. No more, no less. It's what it
does is what makes it a "virus" rather than, say, Photoshop, or the
Apache web server, or a device driver.
Viruses DO NOT CROSS OS barriers. There is no such thing as a "Intel"
or "PPC" virus. There are only programs, that run on specific
operating systems. Even if the virus is written in CPU-specific
machine code, it still must interact with operating system components
to do it's work. A PC cannot give a Mac a virus and vice versa.
Modern PC viruses rely on user interaction to infect systems, most of
the time. There is malware that can be gotten via hitting infected web
sites, but most often they're transmitted these days as bogus files,
like 'Electronic Greeting Cards' or ZIP attachments claiming that
they're bounced mails, or infected Acrobat files.
Any Mac viruses will be transmitted in the same fashion, the only
current 'in the wild' Mac trojans out there are presented as a 'new
video codec' you need to watch the free video (99.999% of the time
it's advertised as particularly juicy porn) or pirated copies of MS
Office.
--
Bruce Johnson
University of Arizona
College of Pharmacy
Information Technology Group
Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs
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