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Subject:Re: Word's Macro Virus From:Matt Ion <soundy -at- NEXTLEVEL -dot- COM> Date:Wed, 29 May 1996 16:25:51 -0800
On Wed, 29 May 1996 14:18:24 +0300, Jacob Matthan wrote:
>> After spending 1 hour devirusing my Mac, I can firmly say that the answer
>> is "yes". And I was one of the lucky ones. QUALCOMM is a Mac house -
>> and some people here took more than 24 hours devirusing their Mac.
>I cannot understand how anyone could have spent 24 hours devirusing the
>Macs
I can't speak from any kind of experience with Macs, but the Atari STs
we use in the studio (a Mega/4 STe and an older 1040 STe, both with
hard drives) once became infected from the same outside disk with what
was known as a "drunk mouse virus". It was essentially harmless, but
would cause the mouse to reverse Y-axis movement every sixth click of
the mouse button.
Actually, only the one became infected after a friend brought a disk
with the virus in and said, "check this out, this is cool!" We ran
three different scanners on that machine after playing with the thing,
including what was at the time THE best-rated scanner for Ataris. All
reported the system to be clean, but within a few days, it was back...
and it had infected both machines through the exchange of
previously-clean internal (to the studio) diskettes.
It ultimately took a full backup/low-level format/restore of both
drives to rid the systems of this pest. It didn't attach itself to any
programs; only to the disk itself. It came as its own separate
program, in fact -- sort of a combined trojan/virus.
In any case, it certainly took more than 24 hours to get rid of this
pervasive and stubborn little bugger.
>And, to be honest, I have never ever had a virus on my Mac - probably
>because mine was a Microsoft Free computer laboratory!
:-)
If it weren't for two measly Windows programs and a couple games I just
HAVE to have (Extreme Pinball and Descent II :) I could set my system
as PROTECTONLY=YES, which means only native protected-mode apps will
run (no DOS, and of course, no Windows).
OS/2 is fairly resistant to DOS virii, since most of them must directly
access the hardware in order to infect it, and OS/2 tends to not allow
any software except the OS itself to access the hardware, which makes
it very difficult for these baddies to do their thing. PROTECTONLY=YES
makes it simply impossible for them to operate in the first place.
There are rumours that a couple OS/2 native virii have been created "in
the laboratory" but they're supposedly rather difficult to create and
don't propogate readily - in effect, a fully native OS/2 system is
virtually impervious to virus attack.
Your friend and mine,
Matt
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Maybe all I need, besides my pills and surgery,
is a new metaphor for... reality." -- Queensryche
Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of Next Level
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