Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!ukc!axion!galadriel!stevep
From: stevep@galadriel.bt.co.uk (Steve Paine)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re^2: Club pirating orgies (planting viruses: The Amiga Lamer
Message-ID: <590@galadriel.bt.co.uk>
Date: 23 Feb 90 13:44:46 GMT
References: <163@uncmed.med.unc.edu>
Organization: RT6115, BTRL, Martlesham Heath, England
Lines: 26

news@uncmed.med.unc.edu (Usenet News Account) writes:
>     The Amiga world is already the unfortunate victim of a virus that was
>apparantly meant as an attack on pirates called "lamers", hence the name
>Lamer Exterminator.  It works by screwing up diskcopies (only) by, I
>believe, writing the word "LAMER" to random blocks during a diskcopy.
>Needless to say this virus rapidly escaped the bounds of pirates and is in
>the general Amiga community.  I am not sure who I would consider the
>bigger scumbuckets,  big time pirates or destructive virus programmers,
>so it is hard to decide the lesser of these two evils.

Tell me about it. I got the LAMER virus from somewhere, and it got on to
one of my development disks. The worst thing about it was that I had just
bought a second hand disk drive and I put the disk error messages down to the
new drive needing allignment.
After some 2 MONTHS of extra backups (obviously making the problem worse)
I had so many errors that it was getting rediculous. Out came the disk editor
and there was the LAMER!LAMER!LAMER!LAMER block. SHIT! By using combinations
of backups the only thing I lost was time, but at least it taught me to
forget 'It will never happen to me' syndrome! - VIRUSX3.2 caught it on
over 70% of my disks after I started using it! To be honest i'm more
annoyed at myself for not having a virus exterminator than the mindless
berk who put it there in the first place.
	
	Thank you and goodnight!

Steve Paine.