Saturday, April 08, 2006

POC cross platform Linux and Windows virus found.

A cross platform virus that works on both Linux and Windows machines. It is claimed to be capable of infecting both the linux ELF binaries and .exe's from windows. The impact of the virus at this point is very low in itself, but it is a sign the cross platform aspects are becoming important. As the developers of viruses continue to research this, we will see (more) cross platform malware come about in the future. Even today websites sending exploits to their visitors tend to detect what browser/platform the visitor is using and send a matching exploit to install some malware and earn their quarter for each confirmed installation.Planning ahead and also protecting the Linux, UNIX and Mac OS X, machines with anti-virus measures is a good thing to start on now if you haven't done so already. The virus is called BiWiLi. Please note also that we have seen some other cross platform viruses infecting Linux and Windows in the past as well.