Research vividly in the dynamics of a compact disk that give the ability to resist virus of all.

Ayden Beeson

Senior network specialist at Charles Sturt University (2016-present)

Answered Mar 16, 2017 ~Quora

A CD can contain a virus just like any other media, but the difference is in how that media works.

Most CDs are generally read only, as they have been either pressed, or burnt and are like that
forever. As a result of this the content in them is usually exactly what is expected and nothing more, as
nothing can quietly write itself to a CD months later when a pc it is inserted into gets a virus.

Rewritable CDs do exist, but they also require a special process to write data to them, which
creates a similar situation to RO CDs.

Flash drives are generally rewritable at any given time, and are mounted that way by every
device you plug them into. This means if you plug it into an infected PC with a virus designed to spread
itself that way, the drive is compromised immediately.

My standard advice is don't plug in any flash drive that you received from a source you don't 100% trust.
If you need to do so to check who owns it (if you found a lost drive) or to get a file onto one, I'd suggest
using a Linux live distribution on your pc, this will allow you to insert the flash drive, check the contents,
copy over what you need, then remove the drive without risking infection, then you just restart your pc
without your live disk / flash drive inserted and you are back to your regular O/S like normal. We get
them fairly regularly in student labs, usually a student has just forgotten it and we have found everything
from PhD thesis documents, to nude pictures, including a few with key logger Trojans on them, so it is a
real risk to not take precautions when checking them (though we are a higher risk environment than
most people will generally see).

Dave Gutz

Mechanical Engineer at GE Aviation (1979-present)

Answered Mar 16, 2017

One could not infect a CD that is already burned because no information is being added to the CD. The
CD could have been burned with a virus inside of something added to the CD however. When you say
“affected,” I think you mean adding to it by casual use. In that case a burner would have to be started up
and run which does not happen casually. However I would think one of those CD drives that is attached
as a hard disk, live CD, could be hijacked by a malicious program and have virus elements installed on it.
Then a live CD could be affected in the same way a flash drive is.
Ray Mathew

Software Developer. Psychology Enthusiast.

Senior Consultant (Application Developer) at ThoughtWork

Most CDs and DVDs are ROMs (Read Only Memory). You can only read the information out of
them, but you cannot write anything.

Secondly, CDs and DVDs are hardware. At most you can write a virus onto them, but it won't affect them.
It only affects a computer when you insert the virus-carrying CD or DVD into a computer. Why won't it
affect them? Because viruses affect a computer by interacting with the software and modifying its
registries. A virus is just bits of 1s and 0s, represented by pits and bumps on a CD, same as all the other
data it holds.

However, there is this possibility : Program a virus and write it on a CD so that the next time the
CD is inserted into the computer, the virus makes the computer erase all data on the CD.

If it is a CD-ROM (i.e. read-only) the virus cannot move there since the medium is not writable in the first
place. This cannot be bypassed - it is a physical limitation not a software limitation.

If it is a CD-RW (writable) and the drive is capable to write CD-RW (most do today) the virus can still not
move there directly: a CD-RW does not behave like an external hard disk or USB drive where one can
simply write a file on it. Instead a disk image needs to be prepared and then written to the drive which
usually needs special programs. Of course, a virus might have this capabilities by itself or is able to make
use of such programs found on the system. But it is unlikely that the virus has such capabilities unless it
is explicitly designed for this use case (i.e. usually not).