5) How do viruses spread? (Computer virus)
Description
This article is from the Computer viruses FAQ, by David Harley D.Harley@icrf.icnet.uk, George Wenzel gwenzel@telusplanet.net and Bruce Burrell bpb@umich.edu with numerous contributions by others.
5) How do viruses spread? (Computer virus)
A PC is infected with a boot sector virus (or partition sector
virus) if it is (re-)booted (usually by accident) from an infected
floppy disk in drive A. Boot Sector/MBR infectors are the most
commonly found viruses, and cannot normally spread across a network.
These (normally) spread by accident via floppy disks which may come
from virtually any source: unsolicited demonstration disks,
brand-new software (even from reputable sources), disks used on
your PC by salesmen or engineers, new hardware, or repaired hardware.
A file virus infects other files when the program to which it is
attached is run, and so *can* spread across a network (often very
quickly). They may be spread from the same sources as boot sector
viruses, but also from sources such as Internet FTP sites and
bulletin boards. (This applies also to Trojan Horses.)
A multipartite virus infects boot sectors *and* files. Often,
an infected file is used to infect the boot sector: thus, this is
one case where a boot sector infector could spread across a network.
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