Maslin archive "virus"? (Was: Reasonable price for a complete SOL-20 system?

[william degnan]

Yes, I discovered the virus years ago.  I thought I posted a cleaned
version somewhere is not on my site somewhere.

Bill Degnan
twitter: billdeg
vintagecomputer.net
On Oct 20, 2016 8:17 PM, "Fred Cisin" <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 19 Oct 2016, Sam O'nella wrote:
>>
>>> Does that archive on classiccmp.org have the infected images removed or
>>> cleaned? (Just curious as I remember this came up in a couple other
>>> forums
>>> that I think one or two of the images did have a virus).
>>>
>>
>> an 8080/Z80 compatible CP/M virus???
>> Or are you talking about a virus in some sort of MS-DOS image?
>> Or an MS-DOS boot sector virus that wrote itself onto the "boot sector"
>> of a non-MS-DOS format?
>>
>
> OK, answering my own query, I did a trivial amount of GOOGLEing, and found
> discussion that said that "Stoned" was found in TD0 images of PC-7000
> MS-DOS 2.11.
>
> That is an EXTREMELY common MS-DOS boot sector virus.  And was apparently
> in an image of an MS-DOS disk.  However, some "anti-virus" software would
> not find it, since it might ONLY look in the boot sector for that virus,
> not within an archive image.
> Many other "anti-virus" software will get a lot of false positives, since
> it is only looking for a short "signature" - meaning that the staff in the
> anti-virus company extracts a short sequence from an infected disk, and
> then triggers whenever it encounters that particular sequence of bytes.
>
> Are they skilled enough to extract a significant "signature" that would
> only occur in that virus, or do they grab a random sequence within the
> infected disk?
>
>
> In any case, it is NOT likely to be a problem for any sort of Cromemco
> disk.  And the discussion that GOOGLE turned up was specifically referring
> to MS-DOS 2.11 of PC-7000.
> Do NOT boot an 80x86 machine from one of those images.
> BTW, ANY versions of MS-DOS 2.11 or 3.31 should be saved!  Even if it
> means manually "disinfecting".  Those were the most customized versions of
> MS-DOS, and included 3.5" disk formats that were not PC-DOS compatible,
> special versions of MODE.COM (for non-80x25 screens, and laptop
> externals), etc.
>
>
> --
> Grumpy Ol' Fred                 cisin at xenosoft.com
>