Can a DVD disc transmit a virus?

Asked By anonymous 7060 points N/A Posted on - 04/07/2012

I was wondering whether it is possible to transmit computer viruses through DVD discs that just contain audio files or movies.

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Answered By Don Corleone 0 points N/A #83180

Can a DVD disc transmit a virus?

DVD disks can also transmit computer viruses. The best thing is that viruses do not copy themselves automatically onto the device but have to be burnt onto the disk. When you burn your music as data files, you may do this without knowing that in the folder containing your audio files or movies there’s a virus present in there. Some viruses are by default hidden executable files, to see them you have to enable viewing of hidden files in the control panel. The copied virus can then be transmitted to another machine when you copy the disk to another computer.

To prevent such situations, it is advisable to scan the files using an antivirus before actually copying them onto a DVD.

Regards,

Don Corleone.

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• Posted on - 04/10/2012
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Answered By Sharath Reddy 590495 points N/A #83182

Can a DVD disc transmit a virus?

If you want to know if audio and video files can also get infected by viruses and can be a medium to infect other computers when they are played, I don’t think it is possible. You see, there haven’t been any reports yet of a virus that infects or is designed to attack audio or video files.

And I think it is because of the type of data it contains. Most viruses only attack executable files or files that are using the “.exe” or “.com” extensions and this is very common. Executable files are script programs created using different programming languages. So basically its contents are all instructions to run and instruct the computer.

If you will compare an executable file with a video file, they have different data type contents. Although they are both binary files, video files contain video stream data which is not present in executable file. Video files contain compressed data and this is the video stream while executable files are loose and contain uncompressed data.

When a virus infects a file, it first needs to open that file so it can attach itself at the end of the file which can be done easily on executable files rather than on compressed data like on video files.

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• Posted on - 08/20/2013
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