At the link below, there is a download for a free e-book which I clicked. Before I clicked “Save File”, I noticed it is an exe file, which I know I should be wary of. Is there any way to tell if the download is legit or will someway infect my computer?
Just get an antivirus and download it anyways. I mean odds are its somekind of software that they want to use to view the file, and odds are its probably spyware infeseted. no way to know for sure. just know if it is a reputable site
As a rule, don’t download from any site that produced five pop-up windows when it loads.
“Download it anyways” seems like pretty bad advice to me. Antivirus software won’t help if it contains spyware. I’m wondering if there’s anyone who knows how to pre-scan for that sort of thing.
That seems like a pretty silly rule. I’m sure there are nefarious downloads from sites that don’t use pop-up windows and legit dowloads from pop-ups that do. I didn’t even know it had five pop=ups; as a rule, I use Firefox. 
If it’s an EXE file and you weren’t expecting a program(you were expecting a book/picture/music file/whatever), don’t trust it at all. The chances that it’s not nasty are non-existant.
If it is a program, try googling its name. It it doesn’t show up, I’d be very wary. If it does, see what people are saying about it.
EDIT: And don’t trust anything you got from a P2P network, unless you know a hash value for a legitimate program. P2P is an easy way to spread viruses.
How are you supposed to scan it before you download it. THere is such a thing of being to careful, i mean i could suppose you could have make make a differnt partition on his hard drive to test these things but then again some viruses (not vriri) can jump partitions.
I never said non pop-up sites are all safe.
Actually, I have another hard drive with Linux on it (I can’t shut off this computer right now, though). Since Linux is pretty much virus and spyware proof, it should be okay to download on there, right?
If it is an exe file it will be pretty much useless on a linux box. To find out if it has what you want you need to run the program, which you will not be able to do on your linux box. Which will expose you to the possibility that this is malware.
Downloading an exe, in and of itself, is not dangerous at all. Executing it is potentially very dangerous. If you’re not 100% sure of the difference between those two operations, then don’t download it.
The exe might be a reader app & the e-book file, or it might just be a self-extracting zip of the e-book file. Or, much more likely, it’s all the above with a generous helping of spyware or worse.
Some AV tools can scan for some spyware & adware. Others can’t. The challenge is there’s no tool which will tell you about what it doesn’t know how to detect.
Without a “clean-room” lab set up to snap-shot & quarantine the PC BEFORE you execute it and then do a full-system compare, nuke, & pave AFTER you execute it, there’s no way to be both safe & sure.
So it comes down to the eternal question:
[Dirty Harry]
Do ya feel lucky, bobsled? Well??? Do yah?
[/Dirty Harry]
If your using FireFox there is an extension that does just that, Dr.Web anti-virus link checker.
As good as that might sound there’s still the problem that Dr.Web can only find what it has signatures for, i.e. it might be great at finding viruses but miss trojans or key loggers.
Your best option is to have as many malware detection programs as you can find (preferably freeware) that allow you to scan individual files on demand (here’s a good place to start looking Spyware Warrior).
CMC fnord!
I downloaded it on a virtual pc that’s set to read-only. it scanned with AVG with no problems.
I used winrar to view the exe and saw just .jpgs and html in it. It looks like it has its own browers to render the pages.
It’s a marketing site. You may very subject yourself to adware, spyware and SPAM if your view the demo ebook using their viewer if the viewer calls home without your knowledge.
I’ve de-linked the links, just in case it is viral. We don’t want anyone clicking on it by accident.