Backing up some files, Do viruses/trojans do any harm if they were zipped?

[Cael]

Viruses do spread themselves onto usb drives and external hdd nowadays. And when you plug the drives into your new pc, the viruses will autorun and copy themselves onto the new pc. So yup, while backing up is always good, you will still risk infesting all your computers if you are not careful.

 

[Decker]

Viruses do spread themselves onto usb drives and external hdd nowadays. And when you plug the drives into your new pc, the viruses will autorun and copy themselves onto the new pc. So yup, while backing up is always good, you will still risk infesting all your computers if you are not careful.

Er, nope, the virused files need to at the very least be accessed, they don't sit there all active and waiting to run riot.
That's why you need to plug the disk into an uptodate virus protected machine to do the scan on.

 

[Cael]

Autorun.inf is the way they spread. So technically yes the virus files are still being accessed somehow, but not exactly by the users. And hence that's what I'm referring to as "spreading themselves".

I actually read an article on how antivirus softwares are unable to keep up nowadays. Latest trojans have a way to re-program themselves if users visit an infected website, and it makes the antivirus software always impossible to keep up with all the various versions that keep changing themselves.

 

[BananaMaster]

True,

Viruses now adays abuse the autorun.inf file, It's a file that is put in the root directory of a drive (eg. Floppy disk, CD, USB memory, etc) and when the it is added to the mounted list the file will run and it just says that idk Virus.exe will run, So other PC's are in danger.

 

[Decker]

That's why I kept saying plug it into a fully protected system, that would catch any autoruns, and yes lots of viruses are self mutating, but it's the type of process that triggers AV in those cases not just filename or content, some AV's are a bit clever :wink2: