Microbes Virus

Virus Name: Microbes Aliases: V Status: Common Discovered: June, 1990 Symptoms: BSR Origin: Bombay, India Eff Length: N/A Type Code: BR - Floppy Boot Sector Infector Detection Method: ViruScan, F-Prot, NAV, Sweep, AVTK, IBMAV, NAVDX, VAlert, PCScan, ChAV Removal Instructions: M-Disk, or DOS SYS command General Comments: The Microbes virus was isolated in June, 1990 in India. It is a memory resident boot sector infector of diskettes boot sectors. The Microbes virus becomes memory resident when a system is booted from a disk infected with the Microbes virus. The system may hang on this boot, and inserting a diskette to boot from will result in this new diskette becoming infected. At least on the author's XT test system, the system could not successfully boot with the Microbes virus present without powering off the system and rebooting from a write protected master boot diskette. As with other boot sector infectors, Microbes can be disinfected from system diskettes by powering off the system and booting from a known-clean, write-protected master boot diskette for the system. The DOS SYS command can then be used to recreate the boot sector on the diskette. For non-system data diskettes, the programs and data files on the infected data diskette can be copied with the DOS COPY command to a non-infected diskette, and then the original diskette reformatted.