Is virus infection by inserting floppy disk possible? (PC) (Mac)

[Thomas DiBlasi]

Hi,

I've been monitoring Virus-l digest since December and now for the
first time have a question.

Is it possible for a virus, trojan, worm, etc. to infect a hard disk
or RAM simply by inserting an infected floppy into a drive without
execution??

I thought I saw something on how some PC's /MAC's can recognize the
presence of a floppy after insertion without the benefit of an access
command being entered.

[Rob Slade]

dib...@mail-gw.ncsl.nist.gov (Thomas DiBlasi) writes:

> Is it possible for a virus, trojan, worm, etc. to infect a hard disk
> or RAM simply by inserting an infected floppy into a drive without
> execution??

A short answer: on a Mac, yes. However, most of the Mac virus protection
programs do automatic detection on disk insertion.

On a PC: no. Or at least, not with standard machines. (I use an old NEC
laptop for my comm sessions, and it growls at every disk insertion so it
must be doing *something*. But most PC's don't.)

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Security | here."

[Michael Kerner]

That's what WDEF viruses do on the Macintosh - they transfer from the
"desktop" file of the infected floppy to the host. However, they are
also extremely easy to kill, and don't do any real damage, so they are
not (yet) seen as a big threat.

Mikey.
Mac Admin
WSOM CSG
CWRU
mi...@pyrite.som.cwru.edu