15 year anniversary

[Marcuz]

@NitroX86: nope, non standard boot does just mean that the bootblock is not in the amigados format, i.e. old file system (OFS), fast file system (FFS) or one of the many customized ones. for instance "kikstart 2.0 silent start".
but others guys here can help you better in details

as for me i got a bunch of disks infected by lamer exterminator and the disk 2 of eye of the beholder possibly infected by saddam.
so i played for some time with BootX and V.I.P. just thinking to save a copy of every virus found and build me a library to platy nasty jokes to friends...
very stupid of me. but then we believe ourselves kinda of hackers!
anyway at the time i was not aware of the effect of viruses, and to be honest i did'nt experiment any problem with them: don't know exactly why, but the viruses were placidly sleeping in their disks and the only annoyance was that i was not able to remove some of them.
what kind of damage have you experimented instead?

[Twistin'Ghost]

Originally posted by Nazgûl
Hmm, never heard of that virus. What did it do? I always thought Saddam and Lamer Exterminator were the nastiest?

This was quite nasty...the worst Amiga virus created that I am aware of. It first appeared on BBS's in a util called Modem Checker. When executed, it shuts down SnoopDos if it's running, tells you your modem is good, then replaces the loadwb command with the actual virus itself. So during your next bootup, it launches from the startup-sequence, then waits a while before doing its nasty task, which is to low level format any writeable drive on your system. The worst part of this is that it fills the tracks with the word FUCK. Not much chance of recovering any of your files after such an attack. A util called FuckCheck was, I think, the first util to combat this scourge. The way I protected myself from the wrath of Fuck was to rename LoadWB to GoWB and to modify my startup-sequence accordingly. Then I put a dummy loadwb in my C dir in case I got infected, that way I could get the bug but it would never execute.

Actually, now that I think about it, I either have or had ModemChecker somewhere in my old shit...

Anyway, Saddam and LE were sissies by comparison.

[Ziaxx]

I must've been lucky myself, the only viruses that I got back in the days were the SCA, Byte Bandit, North Star and Saddam viruses, of which the only one actually damaging anything was the Saddam virus which damaged a disk with text files I had (especially a long text file with a scroll text I had written to use in a demo). Other than that, none of them did anything to my disks.

In 1987 when the Amiga 500 came out, I was working in a computer shop on Tottenham Court Road (London). One day a guy from Europe (Switzerland ?) came into the shop and started talking about Amiga stuff. He had some discs with him, including some demos and tunes done by him and his mates in Aegis Sonix*. As software was still relatively thin on the ground and I was a big Amiga fan we checked out some of the stuff he had with him. The shop staff used to use that same machine to test / demo games and to duplicate Workbench etc. and it was shortly after this that strange messages started appearing on Amiga screens and games started would refusing to load.

Coincidentally, and with this episode in the back of my mind, I was later interviewed on the BBC World Service to talk about computer viruses, which were a totally new phenomenon at the time as far as the wider public were concerned.

* Definitely remember a nice version of Johanneslust by Hans Joachim Roedelius which is a lovely tune.

First post on this forum. Hello!

[TCD]

Hi massen,

welcome to the EAB!
Luckily I had no virus on my real miggy yet. I've seen some in emulation, but since it's not a big hassle to get a clean image it never was a big problem. Interesting that you got interviewed on computer viruses. How did you get the chance to talk about it?

Originally Posted by TheCyberDruid

How did you get the chance to talk about it?

You know I'm not sure how it happened. They wanted to speak to someone who knew something about the SCA Virus and as I was one of the first to identify and describe it they must have got my name, probably from someone at Commodore. The shop I worked in was quite high profile as far as Amiga stuff went.

Thanks for the welcome.

[TCD]

You're welcome.
Always nice to read something about these 'pioneer' times when everything was new and exciting The computer world was much smaller back in the days and that wasn't a real bad thing

[Shoonay]

Back in the days, I was called a Lamer thanks to the Lamer Exterminator virus that got on me Wings disk 1, thanks to a dumb friend...
Still got a few "Happy New Year '96" infections on me current A1200 HD setup, but they're not that annoying, so I just ignor them...

[chiark]

Welcome

@Massen - who did you work for? I worked for Diamond in Leamington Spa at the weekends, and they had a branch on TCR...

Incidentally, my 500 came complete with the SCA Virus on the 10 PD disks it came with... Caused much head scratching, but also made me learn about the machine so I have a lot to thank that virus for!

(Thread from the dead FTW!)

[Paul_s]

Originally Posted by Djay

the Saddam was a complete bastard of a virus

that barsteward still gives me nightmares

Originally Posted by chiark

Welcome

@Massen - who did you work for? I worked for Diamond in Leamington Spa at the weekends, and they had a branch on TCR...

G&B (not Gultr0nics or Anv1ka...), who had three branches on the road at that time. I was just a kid fresh out of school, but as such I really knew my shit. I sold a LOT of Amigas! I sold a lot of Amstrads too, but that's another story. Commission is commission though, it was the LOADSAMONEY 80s!

[chiark]

Excellent stuff . I only ever worked part time selling stuff, but still made a good living out of it (at uni), especially combined with writing for CU Amiga and Amiga Computing

[Sune Salminen]

What was the name of the virus that took over 'disk validator'?

I lost some of my best Oktalyzer music to that virus.

[chiark]

That'll have been Saddam, then . Reet bastid, as noted above!