Gaming Question on Dropbox

[Aijelsop]

Hello, I had a question about Dropbox.

If I have it installed on multiple machines, and one machine gets a virus on the system, can it infect the dropbox account and then the other computers that are using the same account?

What if you dragged an exe virus (not knowing it is a virus) in your dropbox folder, can that infect the other machines using the same Dropbox account?

Thanks.

 

[Rydian]

Seeing as the dropbox folder is treated like a normal system folder and writable using the same APIs, yes.

It doesn't have to be an EXE, it could even be something like an image that infects the machine when it tries to thumbnail it.

If there's a serious chance of one device being infected, segregate it from the others.

 

[Aijelsop]

Seeing as the dropbox folder is treated like a normal system folder and writable using the same APIs, yes.

It doesn't have to be an EXE, it could even be something like an image that infects the machine when it tries to thumbnail it.

If there's a serious chance of one device being infected, segregate it from the others.

None of my computers are infected. I was just wondering, in case one does, then I'd have to be worried about the other. With the second one, I think I'll stick to using the online dropbox service. Just to be safe as I'm not the only one using this computer.

 

[Rydian]

Sounds good, though if it's an infection your AV would catch, it should catch it before it does anything anyways (I'm not sure exactly how the writes are done though so I can't say for sure if they're intercepted first like most things).