Harmless virus infects both Windows and Linux, but could signal new trend

Security vendor Kaspersky has found a proof of concept virus that is able to infect both Linux and Windows systems.

The security company refers to the online pest as Virus.Linux.Bi.a/Virus.Win32.Bi.a.

While the virus is capable of infecting files on both Windows and Linux platforms, it only infects files in the current directory. Most importantly, it doesn’t cause any actual harm to infected systems and doesn't self-propagate.

Especially the ability to infect Linux systems limits the virus in its ability to cause harm, said David Perry, global education director with anti virus vendor Trend Micro. Users need to manually download and open the file to get infected, and since Linux is mostly used on servers, few users on that operating system will get infected.

"There would be more gain to be made by going between Windows and OS X rather than Windows and Linux because there are more desktops available on OS X," Perry said.

"This is an interesting milestone, but no reason to sell the farm. Nobody has to stay up late tonight."

The code however could spark the creation of more cross platform viruses, he noted, as the virus author has in a sense blazed a new trail.

"This is an advance thing. It's written in an assembler so we know it's written by a programmer, as opposed to a lot of other [malware]. The gauntlet is down. Somebody has proof that they can write a virus for two operating systems. "

The virus appears to be written by a traditional malware author who is showing off his programming skills rather than creating malware for financial gain, he added. The virus leaves a text string in infected files that refers to the Immortal Riot with, an online publication where virus authors between 1993 and 1996 posted proof of concept code for viruses.