Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!ihnp4!ucbvax!SIMTEL20.ARPA!W8SDZ From: W8SDZ@SIMTEL20.ARPA (Keith Petersen) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc Subject: FSP_12 bugs Message-ID: Date: 30 May 88 22:31:00 GMT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Lines: 59 Date: Monday, 30 May 1988 14:59-MDT From: Gregory Hicks COMFLEACTS To: kpetersen@simtel20.arpa Re: FSP_12 ----BEGINNING OF FORWARDED MESSAGES---- Received: from CORNELLC.CCS.CORNELL.EDU by WALKER-EMH.ARPA ; 30 May 88 15:04:02 GMT Received: from VM1.TAU.AC.IL by CORNELLC.CCS.CORNELL.EDU ; Mon, 30 May 88 10:59:54 EDT Received: by TAUNIVM (Mailer X1.24) id 9669; Mon, 30 May 88 18:01:44 IST Date: Mon, 30 May 1988 18:01 IST From: Revised List Processor (1.5n) Subject: File: "IBMPC-L MAIL" being sent to you To: HICKS@WALKER-EMH.ARPA Received: from TREARN.BITNET by VM1.TAU.AC.IL (Mailer X1.24) with BSMTP id 9656; Mon, 30 May 88 18:01:13 IST Received: by TREARN (Mailer X1.25) id 3486; Mon, 30 May 88 17:58:23 GMT Date: Mon, 30 May 88 17:40:34 GMT From: Turgut Kalfaoglu To: PCSERV-L@RPICICGE , IBMPC-L@TAUNIVM * Important * The other day, I got an interesting file called FSP_12.ARC in the Simtel's directory. I was happy to notice that it was a resident program to detect any access to disk. What the program does is that it pops open a window asking you to confirm what the running program 'wishes' to do. Great so far. I used it for a while, under DOS 3.3, with FastOpen installed, then I ran a batch program of mine, which cleans out all *.BAK and *.~?? files from my disk. FSP_12 warned me that the batch file was about to write directly to the disk (as opposed to using services), which I permitted, since I have used that batch a few thousand times before. This batch file consisted of: CLEAN *.BAK CLEAN *.~?? -- clean, being a global-deletion program. After the successful completion of the batch, I did a DIR. and found 64 files, instead of the usual 250. I went to another dirs, found garbled directory listings. CHKDSK did not think much of my disk: 'Probably non-DOS disk' You can guess the rest: FORMAT C: /V/S, and much heartache. I am not sure why FSP_12 did that, perhaps because of FASTOPEN. Watch out! It can happen to you too! PS: If Virus-Protecting programs do this, I wonder what a real virus can do! Sincerely, -turgut ----END OF FORWARDED MESSAGES---- Keith: Any Ideas? Regards, Gregory Hicks