Director of Technical Services, Baka Industries Inc.

John Norstad of Northwestern University recently released Disinfectant 3.6, an update of his free anti-viral Macintosh utility, to handle a recently discovered nVIR B clone. The clone appears to have been designed explicitly to bypass checks in both the Disinfectant 3.5 application and its accompanying protection extension.

According to Norstad's announcement last Friday, the new clone, which was first sighted in Great Britain, is functionally the same as the original nVIR B virus and its various clones. nVIR B and its clones infect Macintosh system software and applications and may make the Macintosh beep. (The original nVIR A virus uses MacInTalk, if it's installed, to say "Don't panic.")

In addition to detecting all known clones of the nVIR B virus, Disinfectant 3.6 adds the ability to use the Finder's Get Info window to change Disinfectant's memory allocation and paste in a custom Finder icon. The ability to change Disinfectant's memory partition can be important for some users: the default memory setting may not be large enough to scan the large code resources in some modern applications.

Disinfectant 3.6 is available on the Internet at:

ftp://ftp.acns.nwu.edu/pub/disinfectant/ disinfectant36.sea.hqx
ftp://mirror.aol.com/pub/info-mac/vir/ disinfectant-36.hqx

It should also be at other popular Internet FTP sites and on commercial online services. We recommend downloading antiviral utilities from known, trustworthy locations.

The authors and publishers of other popular free and commercial antiviral utilities have confirmed that the current versions of their tools appear already effective against the new nVIR B clone. Check with your antiviral provider to make certain that you are using the current version of whichever tool you rely on.

Information from:
John Norstad