Cross-platform virus?

[Daniel Carrera]

Hello,

I'm sure you've heard about the "cross-platform virus" that apparently 
runs on both Windows and Linux.

http://os.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=06/04/17/1752213&tid=2
http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=06/04/18/1941251&from=rss

I'm not clear exactly in which way it is cross platform. For example, I 
see the NewsForge team using WINE to run it (that's not 
cross-platform!). I also see people saying that the binary is both a 
valid PE and a valid ELF, but this is not possible because PE and ELF 
have different magic numbers. I also see people saying that there are 
actually two versions, one for Linux and one for Windows. Most of the 
binary is common for both versions, but there's still some difference 
(at a minimum, they must have different magic numbers). This implies 
that if I download the Windows version, it would not actually run on 
Linux, so it's no different than saying that Firefox is cross-platform.

Does anyone actually know what happened and can explain it to me? The 
news articles seem confused.

Best,
Daniel.
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