Best Anti-virus (with API)

[tygre]

Hi all!

I was wondering what is currently the best anti-virus(es)... and if one of them can be used from external program using some kind of API? I would like to check for virus archive pulled from the Internet

Cheers!

[thomas]

xvs.library

https://www.vht-dk.dk/amiga/download.htm

[Hewitson]

I wouldn't even bother. I'm not aware of any viruses which infect the hard drive, they're all targeted at floppies.

[tygre]

Hi Thomas and Hewitson!

Thanks Thomas! Will look into using it
I agree with you, Hewitson, but it's cool nonetheless to check for anti-viruses

Cheers!

[jPV]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

I wouldn't even bother. I'm not aware of any viruses which infect the hard drive, they're all targeted at floppies.

WTF? There are lots of HD viruses around. If not new ones, but for example HNY96 is very popular even today. You can spot it regularly in new demoscene products and can see people finding it on their system files in C: when they have random boot issues. It's still good to check new (and old) files.

BTW. AmiKit checks all unarchived files automatically, when you unpack lha archives etc. Maybe you could check it how it's done there...

[Hewitson]

It's not true that there are "lots" of HD viruses. There's not even "lots" of bootblock viruses.

However after doing some research on HNY96 I stand corrected.

[thomas]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

It's not true that there are "lots" of HD viruses. There's not even "lots" of bootblock viruses.

Please define what a "lot" is in your opinion.

The web site linked above lists 283 bootblock virues, 123 link viruses and similar numbers for other types of malware.

It might not compete with the thousands of Windows viruses out there but nevertheless in my opinion this is quite a lot.

[jPV]

In any case more than "any".

[DrBong]

Originally Posted by tygre

I was wondering what is currently the best anti-virus(es)...

VirusZ III (which uses xvs.library) gets my vote!

https://www.vht-dk.dk/amiga/download.htm

Originally Posted by Hewitson

I wouldn't even bother. I'm not aware of any viruses which infect the hard drive, they're all targeted at floppies.

Originally Posted by jPV

WTF? There are lots of HD viruses around. If not new ones, but for example HNY96 is very popular even today.

Originally Posted by Hewitson

It's not true that there are "lots" of HD viruses. There's not even "lots" of bootblock viruses.

However after doing some research on HNY96 I stand corrected.

Geez, there are some silly "revisionist" comments being made on EAB and other Ami forums these days.....and often by people who probably didn't stick around after the heyday of the bog standard A500/1200 and expand their set-ups with accelerators, hard drives etc. There are actually a lot more hard drive viruses on the Amiga than most people realise.

You just have to look at the list on the Virus Denmark website to realise that there were more than just one or two viruses that affected hard drives. If memory serves, quite a few of the new ones from about 1995/96 onwards affected more DOS devices than just floppy drives. Link and trojan viruses - such as the many variants of Ebola, HNY and Hitch-Hiker - were usually very damaging to Amiga hard drive set-ups. I know I regularly ran virus scans on my Amiga hard drives when I was d/l warez en masse from BBS and ftp sites starting from 1996 until about 2001. Backing up to hard drive, zip/jaz disks or blank CDs in the the early days of CD burners (prior to burn-proof technology) was quite expensive and somewhat unreliable, so you really didn't want to have a hard drive on your Amiga trashed by a virus.

https://www.vht-dk.dk/amiga/desc/virus.htm

[Amon_RA]

Interesting thread...

I don't have any experience using Amiga Anti-Virus programs, so I hope someone could guide me a bit.

I have a few boxes of floppy disks which I got for free.
What would be the best approach to :

1. Go through all of the floppies without infecting other floppies or the Amiga hdd.
2. Remove viruses present on the floppies while still preserving the content (overwrite the bootblock?)?

[thomas]

1. use an Amiga with Kickstart 2.0 or higher, which has disk-validator in ROM and does not load it from disk
2. use a clean unpatched Workbench matching the kickstart version (2.1 for Kick 2.x or 3.1 for Kick 3.x).
3. make sure that your Amiga is not yet infected. The anti-virus program should be able to tell you, but only if the system is not patched, so OS 3.5 or higher or any other patches should not be used.
4. insert each floppy and let it check by the anti-virus program. If a virus is present in the boot block, install a standard boot block instead. If some files contain a virus, delete the files or try to let the anti-virus program repair them.
Note that NDOS disks contain custom boot code which is lost when you install a normal boot block or a virus. So if you find infected NDOS disks, they are lost beyond repair.

Be sure to keep the write protect switch on on all clean floppy disks.

You might also want to enable the logical write protection for your harddrive by adding lock dh0: to the beginning of s/startup-sequence (replace dh0 by the name of your boot partition).

[Amon_RA]

Super, thank you a lot Thomas!
The steps are crystal clear.