Virus Alert
The August issue of PC Today, published by Database Publications,
carries a cover diskette; this disk has on it a copy of the Ogre Virus. It would appear to
be an accidental infection of the master disks by the magazine. If you or any of your
customers receive the PC Today magazine, we suggest you destroy the disk on the front
cover of Volume 4, Number 4, August edition.
The Ogre virus is only a boot sector virus, the only way a machine can
become infected is if the user leaves the disk in the drive when re-booting. The floppy is
not a boot disk, but an attempted boot on the disk will result in the virus becoming
resident. Running the software on the disk can in no way infect your machine.
The virus, once resident, spreads to the boot tracks on any disk you
subsequently use, so if you re-boot from your normal boot disk the virus once again
becomes resident. After being active for 24 hours the virus starts a second phase, it
monitors keyboard activity; whilst you are using the keyboard the virus does nothing, but
waits for 1 hour of keyboard inactivity before becoming destructive. The idea of this is
for companies who leave their machines on all the time; it assumes that if the keyboard is
not used for 1 hour that the operator has gone home.
After one hour of no keyboard activity, the virus calls the BIOS format
routine to format your hard disk, it also writes over the formatting procedure so that
there is no hope of any data recovery. This virus is extremely vicious on servers.
If anyone thinks they have booted from this floppy and become infected,
the Anti-Virus Toolkit on the Apricot Insight BBS will remove all traces from all your
disks. Another way of removing the virus from your hard drive is to boot from a master DOS
floppy and run SYS C: to update the system tracks. Be sure that you have removed the virus
from ALL your disks or you may well become re-infected.
This information comes from various sources, Apricot Computers Ltd shall
not be liable for incidental or consequential damages resulting from the furnishing,
performance, or use of the above information.
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