Wrong, virus can spread to different partitions, no idea why you think otherwise. Virus can spread from one computer to another without even using the internet, via USB memory sticks etc, many old school virus spread via floppy drive. No clue where you got this totally incorrect idea from. Exploits are used to remotely make a computer execute a virus payload (usually, the other dude who apparently named himself after the captcha as well explained this in more detail). Wrong, that is not sandboxing at all, encrypted drive is mounted wont protect from this sort of attack at all but isolating in a virtual machine properly could and would in most cases, again you have no clue what you are talking about. Tails is based on Debian which is a Linux distro, Linux is a Unix like operating system, BSD family is actually Unix based. Unix is not a language that you write things in, there are various linux/unix shells that have scripting languages associated with them, Unix based operating systems are actually considered to be some of the most highly secured (OpenBSD, FreeBSD), Linux operating systems are generally thought to be pretty secure to highly secure as well, almost all attack payloads like this are written in some assembly language and then put into memory and made to execute via a vulnerability in an application (like a buffer overflow in a C program) that is exploited with something like javascript. What magic property of partitioning makes it so virus cannot spread from one partition to another? There is absolutely nothing that inherently prevents a virus from going to one partition to another, you would need to have some access controls to prevent it from spreading in such a way, or you would need to have real sandboxing, or something else. Saying that a virus cannot spread from one partition to another is about as honest as saying a human cannot jump over an object, it entirely depends on the object, and in many cases a virus will have no trouble infecting files in all partitions. Saying tails is written in Unix is more like saying something that is retarded, tails is based on Debian and uses the Linux Kernel and is written almost exclusively in C, and Linux is a Unix like operating system it isn't really Unix. Tails IS a Linux distro, and neither of them are really Unix based they are Unix like. Look at Wikipedia: BSD = Unix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution , Linux = Unix Like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux This exploit was probably written in Emacs or Notepad++.