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From: boone@athena.cs.uga.edu (Roggie Boone)
Newsgroups: comp.virus
Subject: Virus questions (PC)
Message-ID: <0002.9102081416.AA29807@ubu.cert.sei.cmu.edu>
Date: 6 Feb 91 14:10:57 GMT
Sender: Virus Discussion List <VIRUS-L@LEHIIBM1>
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Approved: krvw@sei.cmu.edu

I have 4 questions regarding computer viruses.  I am rather new to the
study of compuer viruses and the texts that I have read have not answered
these questions for me.

1)  I have seen the SCAN software (MaAffee) scan a computer's memory for
    viruses and noticed that it only scanned the base 640K of RAM.  Do
    viruses typically not infect or use extended/expanded memory?  Are there
    virus scanning packages that will scan the additional memory?  I raise
    this question, because it seems I read somewhere that some computers
    with certain memory management drivers may not erase the contents of
    extended memory on a warm boot, and hence may not erase any virus that
    may be sitting in extended memory. (My memory isn't too good on this
    topic).

2)  Are there anti-virus packages (for PC or any computer) that use
    artificial intelligence techniques to protect the system, or is such
    an effort overkill?

3)  Not meaning to plant ideas, but I was talking with a facutly member
    in the dept. where I work, and the question arose as to whether a virus
    could be transmitted to an orbiting satellite and cause the same havoc
    that viruses cause us PC users.  Is this possible?

4)  I have also noticed that SCAN, for instance, scans basically the .EXE,
    .COM, .SYS, .OVL files in a directory.  Do viruses not infect .TXT or
    .DOC files or maybe C (Pascal, Basic) source code?

I hope these questions have not recently been asked (I'm a new subscriber
to this group).  Thanks for any info about any or all of these questions.

Roggie Boone    (boone@athena.cs.uga.edu)
Research Tech. III
University of Georgia