(no subject)

[chaobell]

Quick, possibly nostalgic question for ya:

When's the last time you saw a boot sector virus?

We just got a box in that turned out to have Eek (b). Last time I saw a boot sector virus was in 1995, when my box caught Stealth Boot B. :)

Comments

[wildkard.livejournal.com]

They do crop up from time to time... I have seen computers that have caught it of the net. I forget the exact strain names, but there are some nice ones that play havoc with Virtual Memory.

Aside from that, I do ocassionally find them on people's "old disks" of archived data, old games or whatnot.

I found my old copy of Jones in the Fast Lane (circa 1991) and popped the disk in because, well it's a fun game... dos mode or no dos mode. It had Junkie.B on it residing in the boot of the floppy. Took all of 2 seconds for my 'modern' virus scanner to clean it off.

[phinnia.livejournal.com]

My husband saw one on an ancient laptop running Windows 3.1 about three years ago. (Stealth boot B)

[diji.livejournal.com]

I remember back my senior year of high school (1998), when I saw an entire lab with Stealth Boot C... had to clean them all too...

[oddball42.livejournal.com]

i think i have a floppy in storage with a monkey.b bootable revenge disk... somewhere... its an old 72k singlesided...


ahhh nostalgia....

[agentz.livejournal.com]

We had a machine with an MBR virus came in to the office about 18 months ago - it was a sorry-ass machine that someone found in a cupboard in a Community Education centre and miraculously decided that they need some data off even though it hadn't been switched on for like 18 months before that. Tehy couldn't get it to boot properly (funny old thing that) and brought it to us - the virus caused us some amusement for a little while 'til the boss told us to do some work!

[erratic0101.livejournal.com]

A few years ago Chernobyl um, "detonated". At around 12am in my dorm room that day I suddenly got call after call after call from friends of mine asking me to immediatly come look at their machines. Then one or two people were knocking on my door. I ended up going from room to room of my friends running triage for their machines.

On one hand, all the lost hard disks I saw was quite sad, on a more sadistic note, on the inside I was laughing my ass off, the whole situation was just too unreal.

Next week's school paper showed a line running around the block to the schools computer shop of students bringing in their comp's for repair.

The most interesting effect I saw that night was when one person's older computer had their entire CMOS overwritten, the machine would simply boot to a single year that would repeat down the screen:

1979
1979
1979
1979
1979

[tjernobyl.livejournal.com]

They've gotten rare enough that I occasionally tell people they don't exist to avoid confusing them. Really, 98% of viruses these days come from using Outlook or IE...