my friend has a virus, could i catch it through an ipod?

[douglasb]

my friend has managed to get himself a virus that causes the amount of space on his HDD to get smaller every time he goes on the internet. he has scanned his comp with norton and AVG but found nothing. I lent him my ipod so he could get some films off it, not knowing about his virus, and now im worried that if i plug my ipod into my comp ill get the virus to.
any advice?
cheers

[staffsMike]

[douglasb]

damn it!! should have thought of that! lol

[Rookie1986]

Awesome!

[staffsMike]

To be slightly more constructive, it's not unheard of that iPods carry viruses. In fact this article suggests apple actually managed to ship some infected iPod videos.
http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/ipod-virus.htm

[Webby]

When your friend goes on the internet his hard drive space goes down...

Temporary internet files FTW!

Or maybe he is just downloading lots of porn who knows.

If Norton is drawing a blank you could try installing a free anti-virus AVG or Avast for example or you could try Panda's Active Scan which requires no installation. http://www.pandasecurity.com/homeuse...ns/activescan/

If you can find the Virus on his PC then you can make sure yours is defended against it with a suitable anti-virus.

[douglasb]

When your friend goes on the internet his hard drive space goes down...

Temporary internet files FTW!

Or maybe he is just downloading lots of porn who knows.

If Norton is drawing a blank you could try installing a free anti-virus AVG or Avast for example or you could try Panda's Active Scan which requires no installation. http://www.pandasecurity.com/homeuse...ns/activescan/

If you can find the Virus on his PC then you can make sure yours is defended against it with a suitable anti-virus.

its not temporary files, its about 8GB thats just dissapeared from the free space. and i think he would remember if he downloaded 8GB of porn...
he has tried AVG aswell as norton

[staffsMike]

its not temporary files, its about 8GB thats just dissapeared from the free space. and i think he would remember if he downloaded 8GB of porn...
he has tried AVG aswell as norton

You might be suprised at how fast you can download left handed

Porn and warez sites are your worst enemy on the net though.. well in terms of viruses anyway lol

[moogle]

The only way you could catch a virus from his pc through the ipod is if the ipod appears as a flash drive and makes an autorun.inf file on the root of the ipod, and then if you have autorun enabled and you plug the ipod in it will run whatever the virus has set (another virus .exe file to spread in your pc)

I've not got an iPod and iirc Apple are DRM crazy so I'm guessing you cant use it as a filestorage device. Or you can but you cant play music on it without going through iTunes.

[SiM]

An ipod is a virus - unless you use rockbox

[douglasb]

The only way you could catch a virus from his pc through the ipod is if the ipod appears as a flash drive and makes an autorun.inf file on the root of the ipod, and then if you have autorun enabled and you plug the ipod in it will run whatever the virus has set (another virus .exe file to spread in your pc)

thanks
but is there any way you could check if it had?

[shaithis]

thanks
but is there any way you could check if it had?

Run a virus scan on the iPod. It should appear as a drive letter in Windows.

[razor92]

A good way to check if somthing has left an Autorun.inf file on your ipod if when you load it up as file storage device, right click on the icon in My Computer (or Computer if you have Vista) and if the first option is "Autorun" or somthing similar (it is usaual in bold) then something has left an Autorun.inf file on you Ipod. (This could be a virus or a ligitiment program).

However if you just pluged you Ipod into his computer and added the videos using ITunes (so that the Ipod did not appear in My Computer (or Computer if vista)) then it is highly unlikly that there is a virus on it because of Apple crazy DRM protection.

[Whiternoise]

You might be suprised at how fast you can download left handed

I'm ambidextrous, as it happens.


You'll have to put the pod in some mode that allows the PC to see it as a portable hard drive. Otherwise it's only visible in iTunes.

[Thorsson]

I'm ambidextrous, as it happens.

Ah, you like boys and girls. You have to download even faster then...

[martinm10]

always ensure you have anti virus software on the computer and scan all files before sending to ipod