Windows has always been considered a vulnerable OS to viruses, but not Linux. I haven’t heared about any virus for Linux except for some university project somewhere. So do not expect me to discover a new virus for Linux. This is much more interesting, actually.

The virus I found, running, on Linux (Ubuntu to be specific) was actually a Windows virus. Some of you might already have figured out the culprit here. So how did the Windows virus manage to run on Linux which doesn’t even support any Windows specific file.

A windows virus running in Linux (Ubuntu)

Wine is a software application which allows Unix like OSes to run programs written for Windows. So if you set the default assocaiation for exe files to Wine in Linux, you can just double click on exe files and run them just like you do in Windows. So if this is right then you can get infected with almost any Windows Virus in Linux.. although the consequences may not be much important.

[Screen Shot soon]

Any Virus using AutoPlay can infect by this method. So if the virus is running after you inserted a USB drive it will copy itself to any external storage device automatically. So virtually you get your USB drive infected with virus from a LINUX system. To prevent this from happeneing do not set the default association for exe file to Wine. Just leave it in the Open with list and chose it when you need to run an exe file.

The removal and detection could be understood from the screen shot provided. Click on the screen shot for a bigger one with more details.

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