Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!ut-emx!osmigo
From: osmigo@ut-emx.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: SCORES ordeal + new(?) SCORES info
Keywords: SCORES
Message-ID: <6685@ut-emx.UUCP>
Date: 8 Oct 88 01:41:04 GMT
Organization: Speech Communication UT Austin
Lines: 41

I've spent the last 3 months without a hard disk. The reason? Catastrophic
failure. Inability to reformat, etc. This ordeal included shipping the device
to Wisconsin (I'm in Texas) *4 times* to get it repaired. Recently, however,
I learned the cause of the problem: SCORES infection. The reason it wouldn't
reformat (normally a sure indication of a hardware problem) was, of course,
that the formatter itself was infected. When I booted up the "repaired"
hard disk, it seemed to work fine, until after I ran an application. Then 
things started crashing again. The infected application had wrecked the device's
new System. Well, enough of the sob story.

The second thing I wanted to point out in this post is that apparently a
System can be fully infected WITHOUT showing the symptoms on the desktop.
Those symptoms are, as you know, "blank document" ScrapBook and NotePad icons,
and two invisibles files called "Desktop" and "Scores." I just finished 
examining a System Folder on a floppy I had lying around; it looked clean as
a whistle. Upon opening it with ResEdit, though, I found ALL(?) of the resources
created in a SCORES infection: DATA ID -4001, atpl ID 128, and INIT's 6, 10,
and 17. This was a supposedly unaltered copy of 6.0/4.2.

I booted up under that System about 10 times, and ran a number of applications
under it as well, trying to get something to happen. No luck. The applications
weren't infected, nor did the telltale signs appear in the System
Folder. The SCORES-installed resources WERE, however, detected by the program
"KillScores 1.0."

From reading the available documentation, I had the impression that those
System Folder additions ALWAYS occured as a result of infection. Not true?
Or, perhaps SCORES has some kind of delayed-action mechanism, where the
resources sit idle until Event X, then create the files. 

I understand that the FBI knows who created this unseen horror. If so, whatever
happened to him? If he's been arrested and they're trying to decide what
to do with the bastard, I have some good ideas. Words cannot describe what
I've been through.


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>--Ron Morgan--------------{ames, utah-cs, uunet}!ut-sally!ut-emx!osmigo-------<
>--Univ. of Texas--{gatech, harvard, pyramid, sequent}!ut-sally!ut-emx!osmigo--<
>--Austin, Texas--------osmigo@ut-emx.UUCP-------osmigo@emx.utexas.edu---------<
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