[Scottish] I have a virus

[Gordon JC Pearce]

On Mon, 2007-04-23 at 07:33 +0100, John Gordon Ollason wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> 	I received a panic phone call yesterday evening from somebody who told me  
> that she had sent me an e-mail with a virus attached. I had received the  
> e-mail, and opened the attachment, a .DOC file, with OpenOffice 2.0  
> working under Fedora Core 4.
> 
> Can I have harmed my system by doing this?
> 
> I don't think I can, but I'd be grateful for some reassurance.

It's unlikely.  Some viruses are written to use the scripting languages
that MS Office has.  They don't really work in OpenOffice.  The other
thing to remember is that while it may be named "somthing.doc" it might
actually just be pretending to be a .doc file when it's actually an
executable file.  Now Microsoft don't make it easy to tell what's
executable or not, because several things may have a valid .exe file
signature but be named .dll or .scr instead.  These won't run in Linux
anyway.

It is actually possible to get a Microsoft Windows virus to run on
Linux, with very careful use of Wine and .dll overrides.  I managed it
once, after nearly four hours of fiddling.  Not that it could do any
real harm anyway...

Gordon