On Tue, 2007-08-07 at 13:42 -0400, James Knott wrote: > A boot sector virus is executed every time the computer is booted. Any > OS can be vulnerable to a boot sector virus during booting, because the > OS is not running at that time. The only protection is what's provided > with the BIOS. On the other hand computers running protected operating > systems, such as Linux or OS/2 cannot be infected when running, as they > have mechanisms to prevent it. DOS and DOS based versions of Windows > (3.1, 95, 98 etc) do not have such protection and can be infected > whenever the virus is run.
MY PII was thus infected because I multi boot with Win311 for legacy apps. Rewriting the MBR from SuSE8.2 at the time did not cure the problem. It was a harmless variant of a known virus which I defeated with Fprot and hard rebooting. At the time using FProt in the recommended way found the virus in memory and therefore refused to clean the infection. I beat this problem by telling FProt to ignore memory and to do the clean then I immediately rebooted. I did this three times then ran FProt in the usual way and no virus was found. From then on I made Linux the default boot and load data from media therein. To protect the anti virus software I kept it zipped in a location not in the PATH and used a script to break out and run the program in a directory I make up at that time. There is not much you can do with such legacy systems but the exorcise in paranoia is healthy. -- ___ _ _ _ ____ _ _ _ | | | | [__ | | | |___ |_|_| ___] | \/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
