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Anti-virus precautions on your Dos machines

Caluser2000

Caluser2000

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Do you take any precautions to stop viral infections on your beloved Dos systems and software?
MS Dos 6.x has a small tsr that you can run on start that tries to prevent boot sectors of the hdd and floppies being infected. I also used F-Prot for the longest time. Tezza posted a thread about 3 years back after being infected and condensed it in his blog http://www.classic-computers.org.nz/blog/2009-08-30-vintage-viruses.htm

I'm also interested in hearing from those that collected viruses. What was your all time favourate?
 
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I remember tezza's thread and noted it with interest at the time, because it hadn't occurred to me that there were any viruses around any more. Of course I forgot that if there was a virus on an old disk, it would still be there.

I have F-PROT 2.28b (Jan 98 ) on my main box and ready to go, but I don't make a habit of using it and have only done so once in recent times. It requires the computers time to be set back. (They apparently didn't foresee the advancement of time.) :p Anyway, I don't believe that there are new viruses for DOS to worry about, so scanning newly acquired disks might be the only thing worth doing.
 
I tend to not use floppies other people made (either toss them or reformat them in a newer machine with AV installed). All original disks I get are imaged on newer machines so that I have an archive , and any issues with reading them or virus are taken care of before they get to then vintage machines. All the archives I have are on a main server so that a virus will be found if something does get by. The HDs I use when setting up vintage machines are wiped before use, any machines that come with a working OS drive are imaged and wiped (there tends to be too much crud on there).

There are archives/images out there on the net that do have a virus in them, and I have seen some boot sector virus on home made bootable OS disks in the past. But the problem is not as wide spread as you would think.
 
Unknown_K said:
There are archives/images out there on the net that do have a virus in them, and I have seen some boot sector virus on home made bootable OS disks in the past. But the problem is not as wide spread as you would think.
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I've seen virii from elementary school kids sharing games in the past, but nowhere else. I wonder just how dangerous they are anyway (the virus I mean). ;)
 
Ole Juul said:
I've seen virii from elementary school kids sharing games in the past, but nowhere else. I wonder just how dangerous they are anyway (the virus I mean). ;)
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I'm guessing that was posted from the lazy persons OS ;)

http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/virii.html
Further reading http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/plural-of-virus.html

Of course as you probably well know there are a wide range of reasons folk use virii:-

a) it looks 'better' or they want to appear of as smarter
b) they don't know it is incorrect
c) it sounds 'better' when said (vi-ree) compared to viruses (vi-rus-is)

Of course some smart@@#$ will point out the error 8).
 
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The plural of virus is neither viri nor virii, nor even vira nor virora. It is quite simply viruses, irrespective of context.
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OK, got it, thanks. :)

I have studied very little Latin (one high school course 100 years ago) and honestly thought that virii sounded about right.

In my defence, you will notice that I generally use very plain English in my writing, although I like a little colour. I stay away from exotic usage such as "then" instead of "than" and similar modern cute-isms - although I have been known to write w00t on occasion. :) So. Viruses it is then.
 
Ole Juul said:
OK, got it, thanks. :)

I have studied very little Latin (one high school course 100 years ago) and honestly thought that virii sounded about right.

In my defence, you will notice that I generally use very plain English in my writing, although I like a little colour. I stay away from exotic usage such as "then" instead of "than" and similar modern cute-isms - although I have been known to write w00t on occasion. :) So. Viruses it is then.
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Is it possible that we've had wrong for some time now, in that 'virus' is actually plural, like shrimp or deer, and the singular is actually 'virum'? I think it's time to turn in.
 
Yes, viruses are still around. I recently extracted work files from old 3.5 inch PC floppies (ex 1996) for someone and there was a virus on one of the disks. My AGV Anti-virus program detected it and dealt to it.

Although modern virus detectors still nab them, I'm not sure how easy it is for these MS-DOS to SPREAD on 32 and 64 bit operating systems? I suspect most of them can't? However, as I mentioned in that original article, they need to be considered when setting up MS-DOS hard drives and a floppy-based software collection for use on real MS-DOS machines. They could be lurking in those long-forgotten floppies, dormant...but just waiting for a chance at life again! :)

What worries me more are the like of Amiga and Atari ST viruses. I know these were around and I have no clue as how to check for them or deal with them.

Tez
 
tezza said:
What worries me more are the like of Amiga and Atari ST viruses. I know these were around and I have no clue as how to check for them or deal with them.

Tez
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For Amiga stuff have had a look at Aminet?


For Atari there is UVK along with a list of what it can and can't disinfect

From UVKs revision history about the last version of it:-
This version's main statistics: 1936 recognised bootsectors, 109 recognised bootsector viruses, 5 recognised link viruses, 41 recognised anti-viruses, 190 recognised resident applications and 89 recognised packer/archive version formats (of a total of 33 different packers/archivers). A total of 800 different bootsectors can be restored.

HTH
 
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Thanks. I've quite a few donated Amiga and Atari disks. Next time I drag them out I'll look up those two links (which I've bookmarked).

Tez
 
tezza said:
Thanks. I've quite a few donated Amiga and Atari disks. Next time I drag them out I'll look up those two links (which I've bookmarked).

Tez
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You are welcome. http://www.vht-dk.dk/amiga/download.htm would be useful too. At least 3 of those scanners need the xvs library. I'm sure the Atari and Amiga buffs can lend a helping hand if you get stuck. Some nifty virus screen shots - http://www.vht-dk.dk/amiga/diverse/screenshot.htm

Seems there's one for the C64 too http://noname.c64.org/csdb/release/?id=106608
 
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My favourite viruses were DEN ZUK (displayed an animated logo at ctr+alt+del), yankee doodle (used the pc speaker to play a song from time to time), and rain (the letters were falling down on textmode screens - extremely enjoyable, albeit somewhat disturbing). Got them by heaps from the local pirate game market.

PS don't remember ever seeing any virus on the Amiga, failing floppies and guru meditation (the Amiga BSOD, I guess it was named "software failure" later) were a much bigger problem
 
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I have been able (so far) to evade viruses on my vintage computers, except with the occasional popup of the Stoned virus. When I first got my XT, I ran a scan with the IBM Scan virus scanner and it nabbed a virus on there. Still, whenever I transfer files to the older machines, I always scan the files and floppy disk just to make sure.
 
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