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- _____________________________________________________________
- THE COMPUTER INCIDENT ADVISORY CAPABILITY
-
- CIAC
-
- INFORMATION BULLETIN
- _____________________________________________________________
-
- Information about the PC CYBORG (AIDS) trojan horse
-
- December 19, 1989, 1600 PST Number A-10
-
- There recently has been considerable attention in the news
- media about a new trojan horse which advertises that it
- provides information on the AIDS virus to users of IBM PC
- computers and PC clones. Once it enters a system, the trojan
- horse replaces AUTOEXEC.BAT, and may count the number of
- times the infected system has booted until a criterion number
- (90) is reached. At this point PC CYBORG hides directories,
- and scrambles (encrypts) the names of all files on drive C:
- There exists more than one version of this trojan horse, and
- at least one version does not wait to damage drive C:, but
- will hide directories and scramble file names upon the first
- boot after the trojan horse is installed.
-
- At first PC CYBORG was distributed only in Europe, although
- several PC CYBORG infections have recently been reported in
- the U.S. No DOE site has been affected yet, and the
- probability of a widespread infection of this trojan horse
- throughout DOE is extremely small. This trojan horse is
- introduced into systems through a disk called the AIDS
- Information Introductory Diskette, which has been mailed to a
- mailing list which the author(s) of this trojan horse
- obtained. PC CYBORG is a trojan horse, not a virus, and
- thus is limited in ability to spread. This information
- bulletin is being distributed in response to questions raised
- because of the considerable media attention the trojan horse
- has received, more than because of a genuine threat to
- systems.
-
- If you receive a disk in the mail which purports to provide
- information on AIDS, do not load the disk into your computer.
- Please save the disk, and contact CIAC immediately. If you
- have already run this disk, please also call CIAC as soon as
- possible. It is important to leave your PC on if it is
- currently on, or leave it off if it is currently off.
- Failure to do so may result in loss of your data, or make
- recovery more difficult. CIAC has developed recovery
- procedures, which are too lengthy to publish in this
- bulletin.
-
- For further information, including information about recovery
- procedures, please contact CIAC:
-
- Tom Longstaff
- (415) 423-4416 or (FTS) 543-4416
- FAX: (415) 294-5054
-
- or send e-mail to: ciac@tiger.llnl.gov
-
-
-