Emailing someone a computer virus?

Photos, e.g JPGs do not support viruses or worms. The problem isn't the zip format. Your character needs to beware of self-extracting executable files.
emails are not the culprit it's the TYPE of attachments. Also any PC user worth his/her salt will have an anti-virus program and have it activated. Again photos aren't going to be a problem.
C

scarletpeaches said:

This is a basic (ho! Do you see what I did there? BASIC? Oh well...you'll only get that joke if you had a computer in the 80s. Anyway...) enquiry. I don't need to know the technicalities of doing this, only if it's possible.

I have no idea how viruses and worms work, but I need to have one of my characters email another, with a virus attached to a zip file he sends.

What I need to know is, is it possible to send a zipfile by email from one computer to another, containing around 8-10 photos, with only one of those files being infected?

I'm thinking along the lines of, my female MC needs to look at all these photos, and it's a Russian roulette situation; only one of these photos will 'activate' the virus and - to use a technical term - futz her computer.

Also - when she takes her computer into the shop to get everything sorted out again, is it possible to clear the virus off her machine and yet retain every photo she received in the email, even the infected one?

Apologies if this is a 'duh' sounding enquiry but I only use my laptop for games, MS Word and web-surfing which is why I'm picking everyone else's brains here.

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What I need to know is, is it possible to send a zipfile by email from one computer to another, containing around 8-10 photos, with only one of those files being infected?

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You betcha.

More info:
For that matter (not in your requirement) You could have a Photo album effect, a flash program that "automagically" fades from one photo to the next, and only one of those photos is infected.

It could also be that the photo contains a file that is not strictly a "virus" or "infection", but a trojan. When the photo is activated, it goes out to the web, or somewhere else on the network, and invites or brings the rampaging virus back with it. (Anti-virus won't see it as trouble. A really good malware sweeper might/should.)

This goes to your second requirement:

Also - when she takes her computer into the shop to get everything sorted out again, is it possible to clear the virus off her machine and yet retain every photo she received in the email, even the infected one?

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The trojan in the photo invited the virus in. Later, after the virus has been cleaned, the photo is still there. How to look at the photo without re-infecting? You could "high tech" the problem and strip the trojan from the file. Or "low tech" it. Unplug the computer's network wire -- no connection to the internet or the rest of the network.
The trojan will run, but can't go anywhere.

Use screen capture (ALT-PRINT SCREEN) to "take a picture of the picture" sans virus. Then isolate or wipe out the trojan.

And, that describes one afternoon last week.

ETA: Sorry CityMouse, Must beg to differ. It's not the image file. It's what's inside the image file.

That said, CityMouse is right, when the virus starts, a good AV should catch or at least contain it. Unless it is a new one -- which crop up frequently.

She would have to "unzip" them, to separate the individual files. (Although there are programs out there now that allow you to "see" the contents of a zip file without first unzipping it. But I'm not sure how granular they get. Saw it demo'd, didn't get to play with it.) The virus could be coded into the unzip process, separate from the photos, so that she gets the bug without ever actually looking at the photos.

MORE INFO THAN YOU WANTED.

Want it to taunt her? Give it an audio track.

NEWSFLASH: Colin Farrell stalked by computer messages. The messages contain photos of an unknown blonde & sometimes red haired woman dancing while "Humps" plays over and over and over and ov.....

On the technical side, the virus info could be contained in the "metadata" of the photos. That is, when you look at a digital image, not only is thhe information for the image in it, but so is the name of the camera its shot with, the lens used, the fstop, the shutter speed and so on. Metadata is used by Flickr and others to get captions and more.

So, theoretically, you could also jam a trojan horse/worm/virus in there too, with the program used to view the image as the device that opens it (when you go to click the tags or view the caption or something).

And because I'm a giver, here's more: because you get all that other metadata, it is also relatively easy to see who took the photo based on the metadata and nab the bad guy. Unless the culprit is smart or not careless enough to erase it. In that case, might make for good ending, too.

The average user has just a basic virus scanner. Most people don't run malware checkers. There are several trojans right now (like the damned cursed Vundo Trojan) that sneak in past the virus scanners. Such a trojan will then bring in viruses, and often turn off/ funk up your virus scanner.

In my experience, most users have either McAfee or Norton. Neither of which are that great, to be honest. People who don't hang out with tech people wouldn't know that.

I'd say,for what you're doing, tojan's the best place to start. Combine it with a less-than-stellar virus app and ta-da! you are now screwed!

There was a saying in the mid '90's that you couldn't get a virus just by reading an email, you had to click on an attachment for a virus to run on your computer. With Microsoft's "advances" in its email programs (Outlook and Outloox Express, I never understood the difference between the two) in the late 1990's, this quickly became a false statement. The program came with default settings to open up pictures and such. Email programs became webpage display engines (delighting newbies who could send emails with different font sizes and colors, but to the chagrin of us old-timers who used email to tranfer 1. TEXT and 2. ATTACHMENTS), automatically loading in webbugs (tells the sender you're reading the email, tells spammers your address is real AND you opened their spam) and who knows what else.

Also, these pics could be in a "self-extracting archive" which woud be an .exe file rather than a .zip or a bunch of .jpg, .gif or (cringe) .bmp files. There's a ZIP option to create a self-unzipping archive in an .exe file for recipients who don't already have zip (though it comes built into Windows noawadays), but an .exe file can display pictures, as well as do anything else. ANYTHING else. And I'm guessing your recipient/MC doesn't know enough not to click on an .exe attachment.

scarletpeaches said:

The male character's evil but he's not a computer genius...but thanking you kindly. I never know when this would come in handy in future.

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Hmm, then he might barely know how to find a virus and send it along with the pics. But it's not like he couldn't learn or find out, there's ALL KINDS of info on the Internet, apparently including virus source code.

Jason said:

On the technical side, the virus info could be contained in the "metadata" of the photos.

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I'm not that familiar with all the crap internal structures of Windows files, but I recall that an early problem (I heard this secondhand, I don't even know if it's true, but I know many other similar things ARE true) with Outlook Express is when you open a message with a .wav attachment (as it's an "approved" file type, a .wav file only plays a sound), it would automatically play the .wav file. However, the metadata/file type/whatever inside the file could tell the system it's actually an executable file, and it would run the thing rather than playing it as a sound file. That was yet another hole in MS products.

SP, quit cyber-stalking Huge Ackman and he will quit infecting you with viruses.
Prawn

you are now screwed!

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Let's not be suggesting such things to SP. She's hung up on the Hug-lin Farrell-Jackman enough as it is.

For every mousetrap that is built, there are a hundred guys building faster rats.

scarletpeaches said:

Sheesh. This was a serious thread, people. The character to whom I refer is called Andrew and he in no way, shape or form resembles Huglin Farrellman.

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Sure. I know this character, see, and um, she had gotten these pictures in her email. It's not me or anything. Its a character in my book. And so she gets this virus...

scarletpeaches said:

(Ask thethinker42...she's read what I've written of it so far).

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HEY! Leave me out of this...

My sister is an expert at sending friends and family the worst in viruses. She's known as Virus Margie -- much more troublesome than Typhoid Mary ever was.

Send me your e-mail address and I'll introduce you.

Photos got a trojan. If you send SP the right photos, you might need a trojan, if your initials are Leto Jakperson.