Windows (.vbs and .lnk) virus, will it affect my Mac?

Something really odd happened to my pendrive.


My computer has two partitions, a Mac OS X 10.6.8 partition and a Windows 7 partition.


I plugged in my pendrive into my Mac OS X 10.6.8 partition and I opened one of my work files and merrily did my work. I think I even logged in to my Steam account and Facebook account when my pendrive was plugged in.


Then, I realised something. For almost every file I had in my pendrive, there was a corresponding .lnk file and there was also a .vbs file. Knowing that .lnk are Windows shortcut files and .VBS are Visual Basic files, I suspected I have been infected by a virus, so I performed a scan using ClamXav. No detections were found.


So I plugged in the pendrive into my Windows 7 partition, and bam! The only files shown are the shortcut files, my real files are nowhere to be found. My Avira picked up a virus (VBS/Agent.BH.3), but just in case, I removed it from the quarantined list and scanned with Malwarebytes. Malwarebytes did not find anything either.


I scanned my pendrive again with Avira, the VBS/Agent.BH.3 was detected and I deleted it with Avira.


I went back to my Mac Snow Leopard Partition and deleted all the .lnk files. I also formatted my pendrive, just in case.


So, a few questions.


1) Seeing that the virus was a .VBS file, will it have infected my Mac Snow Leopard partition?There are a lot of sensitive work data on my Mac Snow Leopard partition, and I think I even logged in to my Steam and Facebook accounts when the pendrive was plugged in, so I am worried that the virus could have stolen my passwords and important data or buried itself into my Mac Snow Leopard partition.


2) I even opened one of my work files from my pendrive (it was a html file which I opened with Dreamweaver) when my pendrive was infected, and since the virus was able to modify my file and set it to "hidden" on my Windows 7 partition, will it be able to modify my legit file into a virus and will that be a security issue? Also, I accidentally did click on one of the ".lnk" files, but it just came out with a message saying "There is no application set to open the document "xxx.lnk"." From what I can gather, the ".lnk" files are used to open the virus ".vbs" file, but since my Mac Snow Leopard was unable to open the ".lnk" file, does that mean nothing was "activated", and the file did not open and no activity was done with the file at all?


Thanks in advance.

MacBook Pro

Posted on Sep 17, 2013 9:19 AM

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6 replies

Sep 17, 2013 11:44 AM in response to thomas_r.

I checked and it seems my Windows partition is clean.


I guess I just needed the clarification whether me double clicking on the .lnk file is a problem, if it was considered "opened" by my Mac, or it just didn't open, and the fact that I actually opened a html file while my pendrive was affected. But since it's just a Windows issue, I guess I'm good to go, eh?

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Windows (.vbs and .lnk) virus, will it affect my Mac?

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