Been thinking about this a little while, and I've very much like to see how this type of virus/worm will operate in practice.
Most likely, it will require a bit of social engineering for Alice to get Bob to execute the payload. Given the same bit of code that is, say, attached to an email. Let's examine how they would possibly operate.
Alice sends Bob and Charlie an email with a malicious payload as an attachment. "Wow! Look at this great picture of Al Franken being tossed from the Empire State building!" Being good republicans, their interest is piqued. Bob, who is an MS-Windows user either saves the file (IAmNotAVirus.jpg.com) then double-clicks on it, or just double-clicks the attachment. =Poof=, Bob is 0wn3d!
Charlie uses Linux. He either saves the file (IAmNotAVirus.jpg.com) to disk, or double-clicks the attachment to open it. Either way, the file itself won't run automatically? Why not? Well, in order for a file to execute under Linux, it has to be made executable. Just calling it somefile.com or somefile.exe or even somefile.sh is just not enough for the system to execute the file, because Linux doesn't act on a specific type of file based on its filename.
So, most likely, even with an identical virus/worm with the identical payload, under most circumstances, it will still be much more dangerous to MS-Windows users than Linux users.
Thanks, I feel better .....browsing with a Linux system.
Excellent