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Will bootcamp expose my MacBook Air to Windows viruses?
Okay I know very little of this stuff so please bear with me :). So I came across a game (Fiesta Online) that I would like to play on my Mac but sadly it only runs on Windows. After a little bit of research, I see that it can run in bootcamp. I understand that Windows can easily attract viruses..... Will those viruses affect my Mac by installing bootcamp? (I have MacKeeper if that helps anything) Thanks! :)
3 Answers
- 8 years agoFavorite Answer
It will expose Windows to Windows viruses, yes. Programs designed with the Windows API in mind cannot do anything to a different OS, however.
Do mind viruses only damage software, not hardware, and therefore a machine does not get infected -a system gets infected(whether that be a VM, low level runtimes on an industrial machine, a high level OS such as Windows or OSX, or perhaps a random partition from which to attack the OS).
- 7 years ago
1. Although I know of no such virus/malware, I am in the opinion it is possible to write such a virus that when on a mac hardware will download and use drivers to read the HFS+ partition and to infect/corrupt files there.
2. I don't know if this is actually possible but I think a virus can be created that while on windows (and probably on the mac too), it will infect the EFI partition of the hard drive, shouldn't be impossible to install 2 rootkits there, one for windows and one for mac.
Don't think anyone bothered with this.
3. Damaging hardware - if a virus flashes the UEFI? you have a nice bricked shiny mac exterior.
Today even GPU can have firmware updates.. so hardware damage (as in "non operational") is possible just not probable.
