Vintage Virus

[nymetropolitans]

I dug out a pile of 3.5" floppies that haven't seen the light of day in about a decade and started popping them into my fancy "new" fresh from the trash Pentium. I haven't owned a computer with a FDD in many, many years so I was curious to see what was on them. Sure enough on a disk labeled "RAMPAGE" (which I'm pretty sure was a DOS port of the arcade game Rampage) whatever old version of Norton Antivirus is on this computer found a "Stoned.Empire" virus right away and killed it. I was pretty amused that a virus from 1991 still lived on one of my floppy disks. That's the first virus I've gotten infected with this decade!

http://www.computerhope.com/monkey.htm

 

[chuckcmagee]

Good thing you had Norton on the machine. Stoned is a very mean virus. It picks up your partition table and moves it a few sectors down. Really hard to fix the damage once infected if you don't have some virus cleaning software.

I know all about that virus as I was looking at how it worked (back in 1992) and forgot and let the diskette in the drive. Sure enough, next day I turn on the machine and ZAP, got me. Of course, I was kicking myself, I couldn't believe that I had left the diskette in the drive!!

 

[nymetropolitans]

Good thing you had Norton on the machine. Stoned is a very mean virus. It picks up your partition table and moves it a few sectors down. Really hard to fix the damage once infected if you don't have some virus cleaning software.

I know all about that virus as I was looking at how it worked (back in 1992) and forgot and let the diskette in the drive. Sure enough, next day I turn on the machine and ZAP, got me. Of course, I was kicking myself, I couldn't believe that I had left the diskette in the drive!!

I almost removed Norton from that computer, too. On all my modern PCs the anti-virus software has become so ridiculously bloated and memory hungry....and I haven't been infected with one in soooo long, I've just said screw it and run without it. Very glad that old copy of Norton was quietly doing it's job, not annihilating system resources!!

 

[dongfeng]

I almost removed Norton from that computer, too. On all my modern PCs the anti-virus software has become so ridiculously bloated and memory hungry....and I haven't been infected with one in soooo long, I've just said screw it and run without it. Very glad that old copy of Norton was quietly doing it's job, not annihilating system resources!!

That's a very silly thing to do...

Personally I prefer to use AVG Free Edition, a very nice and system friendly anti-virus - but best of all it is free!

 

[nymetropolitans]

That's a very silly thing to do...

Personally I prefer to use AVG Free Edition, a very nice and system friendly anti-virus - but best of all it is free!

That's what I use too, and it's by far the best IMHO, but the newest versions seem to have a problem with A) anything less than 256MB of RAM and B) Windows 2000. I have 2 PCs that fit that description so I just let them slide without it. Last time I even saw a virus with my own two eyes (before finding these floppies!) was sometime in the late 90s haha.

 

[TroyW]

That's a very silly thing to do...

Personally I prefer to use AVG Free Edition, a very nice and system friendly anti-virus - but best of all it is free!

I agree, very risky and silly thing to do. I use AVG 8 here too and personally don't have a problem with it at all, and can't beat the price of the free edition

 

[nymetropolitans]

I agree, very risky and silly thing to do. I use AVG 8 here too and personally don't have a problem with it at all, and can't beat the price of the free edition

Definitely. Under XP, it'll never use more than 10MB of memory either....I can't figure out for the life of me what it's problem with Win2k is. Eats up as much RAM as the entire operating system install does!

 

[TroyW]

Yeah, although I have to say I'm disappointed with the performance of the Resident Shield portion compared to the 7.x version (had to tell it to not scan a few folders I regularly open in explorer that contain many thousands of files, because it would slow my PC to a crawl while browsing those folders), which performed much better in my experience, and the entire interface seems a little sluggish compared to the 7.x version.

Still, for a free version, can't complain, as long as it does the job, those are minor quibbles.

 

[Yzzerdd]

I use AVG Free, too! I see viruses ALL THE TIME, but I run a business in which one of my callings is fixing virus-infested (and spyware, too) computers. I always install AVG Free onto them and dump McAfee. 3/4ths the time they say "Well I have McAfee" and then I say "Sure, but you haven't updated it/paid supcription in 4 years either."

I personally have no problems running it on my 128MB 2K Pro Dell Precision 410 at all. I just disable the link scanner and resident shield as well as one or two other things I can deal without and it runs like a charm.

Never seen a vintage virus, but I have multiple older virus protection programs.

--Jack

 

[Mike Chambers]

I use AVG Free, too! I see viruses ALL THE TIME, but I run a business in which one of my callings is fixing virus-infested (and spyware, too) computers. I always install AVG Free onto them and dump McAfee. 3/4ths the time they say "Well I have McAfee" and then I say "Sure, but you haven't updated it/paid supcription in 4 years either."

I personally have no problems running it on my 128MB 2K Pro Dell Precision 410 at all. I just disable the link scanner and resident shield as well as one or two other things I can deal without and it runs like a charm.

Never seen a vintage virus, but I have multiple older virus protection programs.

--Jack

avg free is an awesome virus app! i don't use any virus protection on my main PC. i probably should, but i don't want it to eat my CPU cycles.

 

[Arial]

Maybe you can try to use a kind of software named "Spydig". I have used it to clear our such hassle from my computer.

 

[digger]

As I also noted in the other thread about virus scanners for Windows 3.1, the DOS version fo F-PROT Antivirus is available for personal use. No more program updates are released for it anymore, but it still gets definition updates regularly.

http://www.f-prot.com/download/home_user/download_fpdos.html

(No, I don't have any stocks in the company behind F-PROT. I just remember having used the DOS scanner and being pleasantly surprised by the speed.)

 

[glitch]

I still find copies of antiEXE virus in the boot sectors of old floppy disks now and then. I also managed to infect my Macintosh LC with the SevenDust virus from an old copy of Microsoft Word 5.1a. It's funny how these things live on.

Personally, I use ClamWin AV with my disk imaging machine. It doesn't provide a resident scanner, but allows me to scan the images I've created. It's free, open source, and updates itself so I can't forget. I use Agax with my Mac LC, which I use for imaging Mac and Apple floppies (5.25" disks too, using an Apple IIe card).

Apparently copies of the ANIMAL game-virus can still be found in UNIVAC software archives.

 

[kvanderlaag]

I had a copy of Norton AntiVirus Corporate that I used to run on my Win9x machines, along with BlackICE Defender for a firewall.

For modern machines, I just don't like AVG. It feels big and cheap, to me, and it only does AV. I've actually been really impressed with FortiClient, lately, from FortiNet. (http://www.fortinet.com) - anyone familiar with them is probably so because of their routers and hardware, but their endpoint security is really good, too, and they just made the standard edition totally free.

 

[Maverick1978]

Back in the day, I used to swear by Central Point Antivirus - I used the versions that came with PCTools Deluxe 7.0/8.0, and they save my bacon on a number of ocassions. Couple that with their DiskFix utility, and resurrecting most computers from virus infections was child's play.

So far as current A/V software, I like Avast Antivirus. It does more than just provide resident/conventional virus scanning, it's free, and (to me) it was better than AVG8, as that really bogged my system down.

 

[Lord Moz]

I dug out a pile of 3.5" floppies that haven't seen the light of day in about a decade and started popping them into my fancy "new" fresh from the trash Pentium. I haven't owned a computer with a FDD in many, many years so I was curious to see what was on them. Sure enough on a disk labeled "RAMPAGE" (which I'm pretty sure was a DOS port of the arcade game Rampage) whatever old version of Norton Antivirus is on this computer found a "Stoned.Empire" virus right away and killed it. I was pretty amused that a virus from 1991 still lived on one of my floppy disks. That's the first virus I've gotten infected with this decade!

http://www.computerhope.com/monkey.htm

I remember getting whomped by stoned back in the day. I seem to remember fixing the partition table by hand in Norton Disk Editor and using it's virtual FAT to recover my files since I didn't have any antivirus at the time. Norton's virtual FAT is very handy, but extremely slow! lol

I think I eliminated all traces of stoned from my disks, but while I was poking around several weeks ago, I discovered an ancient copy of Junkie! Stupid .zip and .com and boot sector infecting virus... only real tipoff at the time was QEMM's stealth feature all of a sudden refused to load. Happily, I had MS-DOS 6.22 on that machine and its included virus checker was Junkie capable.

As frustrating at that was, it was really a trip down memory lane... and after all, that's why I have all these old machines in my house

__
Trevor

 

[MV75]

Seems that if you never got stoned back in the day you were doing something wrong. It was always from a friends disk.....

As for modern systems, I use Microsoft security essentials. Free and straight from the vendor, not 3rd party, and it updates from the same fast place I get OS updates. Plus mine reckons it's only using 4mb memory. Hardly matters when you have 8GB. :D

 

[barythrin]

I don't remember where but recently I saw a picture of a father and son on a terminal and they were playing the animal guessing game. Funny as I was wondering if that was the trojan version (it just copied itself to any home directory you had write access to.. then that person sees it in their home directory and it hopes they play as well). Surprisingly effective social engineering attack.