53 Can viruses spread from one type of computer to another?
Description
This article is from the Computer Viruses FAQ, by Nick FitzGerald n.fitzgerald@csc.canterbury.ac.nz with numerous contributions by others.
53 Can viruses spread from one type of computer to another?
The simple answer is that no currently known viruses can do this.
Although some disk formats may be the same (e.g. Atari ST and DOS), the
different machines interpret the code differently. For example, the
Stoned virus cannot infect an Atari ST as the ST cannot execute the
virus code in the boot sector. The Stoned virus contains instructions
for the 80x86 family of CPUs that the 680x0 CPU family (used in the
Atari ST) can't understand or execute.
The more general answer is that such viruses are possible, but unlikely.
Such a virus would be quite a bit larger than current viruses and might
well be easier to find. Additionally, the low incidence of cross-
platform sharing of software means that any such virus would be unlikely
to spread--it would be a poor environment for virus growth.
A related, but different, issue is that of viruses running under
operating system emulators on machines other than those for which the
operating system was originally designed. This is covered in some
detail elsewhere in the FAQ sheet (see C12).
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