Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!cornell!rochester!PT.CS.CMU.EDU!andrew.cmu.edu!mp1u+ From: mp1u+@andrew.cmu.edu (Michael Portuesi) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: The REAL virus problem Message-ID: Date: 8 Jan 88 18:37:59 GMT Organization: Carnegie Mellon University Lines: 31 In-Reply-To: <8007@g.ms.uky.edu> sean@ms.uky.edu (Sean Casey) writes: > If I have the virus in my machine, and I warm boot with a clean, write > enabled workbench disk, the clean boot sector gets loaded and I have > no problems. Right? Wrong. The way it was explained to me is that > the virus gets hold of the machine before the boot sector can be read in, > and in fact corrupts the good boot sector. > > If what was described in "THE BOOT PROCESS" was all there was to it, then > warm booting with a secure disk would be safe. So, if you boot with a foreign disk, make sure you cold start the machine before you insert your normal boot material. There are PD programs that let you do a coldstart without powering the machine down. But don't blame the people at Commodore for making it "easy" to produce a virus. As other members of the net have pointed out, there are other possible schemes for making an Amiga virus, and designing the system to be safe from every conceivable scheme is about equivalent to solving the halting problem (something I *don't* expect the Commodore engineers to do). VCheck says my Amiga is clean, and I wear condoms when I compute :-). --M -- Michael Portuesi / Carnegie Mellon University ARPA/UUCP: mp1u+@andrew.cmu.edu BITNET: rainwalker@drycas "little things remind me of you...cheap cologne and that damn song too!" --The Flirts, "Jukebox"