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- VIRUS-L Digest Thursday, 6 Apr 1989 Volume 2 : Issue 81
-
- Today's Topics:
- Hard Disks and Viruses
- Virus Detective (Mac)
- Something to ponder...
-
- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
-
- Date: Sat, 01 Apr 89 09:34:15 EDT
- From: Swifty Le-Bard <SPRG9007@PACEVM.BITNET>
- Subject: Hard Disks and Viruses
-
- Greetings to all!
- To all the people who have contributed answers to an unfortunate
- common problem, thanks, I needed that! But anyway, I am planning on
- purchasing a HD (71mb) and would like some suggestions as to how I can
- spot a virus (or potential one), and if dreadfully, I do encounter
- one, what can I do short of erasing all the data.
- The viruses I speak of are the kind that wind up on the boot
- sector, and those that work on COM and EXE files. Do the viruses stay
- resident on one area of the Hard Disk, or do they move around? (copy
- itself to other partitions, and/or subdirectories).
-
- Thanks for any info/answers!
-
- )--==*>PHOENIX<*==--(
-
- ------------------------------
-
- Date: Wed, 05 Apr 89 15:55:25 EST
- From: dmg@mwunix.mitre.org
- Subject: Virus Detective (Mac)
-
- > Is anybody familiar with the Mac desk accessory VirusDetective?
- >How reliable is it? Does it merely identify infected files or will it
- >also remove viruses from files?
-
- Under the expectation that by "reliable" you mean "successfully detect
- a virus", Virus Detective is very reliable for detecting MacMag/Peace,
- nVIR/Hpat (and I suspect the AIDS variant of nVIR), Scores, Init 29,
- and ANTI. In order to detect the latter two viruses, you will need
- version 2.1.1.
-
- For eradication, you will either have to do this manually, or obtain
- another product (a recent one that holds alot of promise is
- Disinfectent. Refer to the March 30 Virus-L digest for the details on
- it).
-
- Virus Detective 2.1.1 and Disenfectant 1.0 are both archived by the
- InfoMAC people. I suggest you ask there for details on how to
- transfer these utilities to your local machine.
-
- Disclaimer: Dis is soup. Dis is Art. Soup. Art.
-
- David M. Gursky
- Member of the Technical Staff, W-143
- Special Projects Department
- The MITRE Corporation
-
- ------------------------------
-
- Date: Wed, 05 Apr 89 18:18:30 EST
- From: dmg@mwunix.mitre.org
- Subject: Something to ponder...
-
- I've been doing some research on viruses here at the office and I
- thought struck me, perhaps someone on InfoMAC or Virus-L can
- contribute something to this:
-
- The Brain virus that afflicts MS-DOS systems has the capability to
- infect the bootstrap code on a floppy disk. This makes it a
- particularly nasty virus because a "warm restart" will not cause the
- virus to go away; it will still be in the bootstrap code that is kept
- in RAM.
-
- My question is this: Why can't the bootstrap code on tracks 0 and 1 of
- a Mac disk be infected? Would Vaccine prevent such an infection?
-
- My suspected answers are (1) it can be done and (2) no, Vaccine would
- be totally ineffective against it.
-
- If my suspicions are indeed correct, how likely is it that Don Brown
- could be persuaded to update Vaccine to prevent this?
-
- David M. Gursky
- Member of the Technical Staff, W-143
- Special Projects Department
- The MITRE Corporation
-
- ------------------------------
-
- End of VIRUS-L Digest
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