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VIRUS-L Digest Monday, 16 Jan 1989 Volume 2 : Issue 16
Today's Topics:
Any connection between the ping-pong virus and WordPerfect? (PC)
re:anti-viral encryption schemes
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 16 Jan 89 16:33:29 IST
From: "Eldad Salzmann (+972)-3-494520" <ELDAD@TAUNIVM.BITNET>
Subject: Any connection between the ping-pong virus and WordPerfect? (PC)
I am new to this list, I heard about it from Norbert Hanke after
sending a query about some viruses I ran into in Israel. The query was
sent both to Dist-Mic at RPICICGE and to RED-UG at TREARN. I'm
repeating my query here for the sake of those who haven't read it. I
will be very grateful if some of you, who feel that they are
well-informed, will be able to enlighten me a little about this
subject.
* * *
Originally entitled:
Needed: A Virus Vademecum
Recently I've encountered the formidable Bouncing Ping-Pong virus on a
friend's hard disk. As far as I know, this is a "benign" virus, which
does not cause any damage to files, but I'm not sure about that.
I heard it resides on the root, but I'm not sure about that either
(what does this imply? That it attacks the system files, the two
hidden DOS files and/or the command.com?).
Is a diskette totally safe when it is write-protected? I was sure
about that, until I read some things which made me worry.
How can one know that the antivirus program s/he received is really
effective? I guess it's not possible to know that, the taste of the
pudding is in the eating...
Was WordPerfect infected by the omnipotent virus?
I don't know whether it had anything to do with the following event,
but... A WordPerfect which was till then working quite smoothly from
the HD, sud- denly began to look at drive A: for its WP.exe file, and
to complain that the diskette was write-protected. At first I thought
that the virus had high expectations and aspired to enlarge its
kingdom over the diskette files as well, but it then occurred to me
that maybe WordPerfect needs to write something on the diskette (or
the HD) when it loads, something like a tempo- rary file which is
erased afterwards. Well, does it? And why does it need to load its
main file from a diskette all of a sudden, after it worked so nicely
from the HD?
* * *
Is there any panacea against viruses? And if not, are there any
programs which counteract both the first known virus (in Israel it was
the famous virus which appended itself to EXE and COM files,
indicating its existence by the appearance of the string "SuMSDos"
within the executable files) and the Bouncing Ping-Pong virus?
Any comments will be appreciated. I sincerely hope there are people on
this list who experienced some sort of a virus (or a Trojan horse) and
survived, and now can share with me their experience.
Eldad Salzmann <ELDAD@TAUNIVM.BITNET>
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 16 Jan 89 12:20:20 EST
From: Don Alvarez <boomer@space.mit.edu>
Subject: re:anti-viral encryption schemes
Homer W. Smith and others have been discussing program encryption as a
method of defending against viruses. Before use, the program would be
decrypted. Any virus which had attached itself to an application
would become scrambled and neutralized when the application was
decrypted.
Sorry to disagree with you, but you have to be very careful that the
"cure" isn't worse than the "disease". If you do daily backups, you
can't loose more than 8 hours work. 30 seconds of decryption time 30
times a day means in two months you waste 8 hours doing decryptions.
Anyone who expects viral infections less frequently than once every
two months is quite literaly wasting their time with this scheme.
Consider instead just spending two minutes a day backing up your work.
At this rate, you will have achieved a savings in time as long as you
are infected at least once a year, and as a side benefit you are
protected against power outages, head crashes, and disasterous typos.
- Don Alvarez
+ ----------------------------------------------------------- +
| Don Alvarez MIT Center For Space Research |
| boomer@SPACE.MIT.EDU 77 Massachusetts Ave 37-618 |
| (617) 253-7457 Cambridge, MA 02139 |
+ ----------------------------------------------------------- +
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End of VIRUS-L Digest
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