15 year anniversary

Ziaxx · 12 November 2002, 22:14

Something wonderful has happened
Your AMIGA is alive!!!
and even better
Some of your disks are infected by a VIRUS
Another masterpiece of the Mega-Mighty SCA

That looks familiar to anyone? I was reading some Swedish PC magazine today at the library, the name of the magazine is Datormagazin, which is also the name of a former C64/Amiga magazine from the late 80s and early 90s. They had a picture in the magazine of the front cover of the issue from November 87, and it read something like "First Amiga virus discovered" or something.

So then it struck me, this year (maybe even this month) it's 15 years since the infamous SCA virus first arrived on many people's floppies! I can't believe it's been that long! 15 years! I still remember that as if it was yesterday (well almost anyway), guess I've been getting old lately!

Dizzy · 13 November 2002, 00:43

Should we have a party for SCA

Djay · 13 November 2002, 01:47

funny how Amiga viruses are as famous as the software they infected.... i remember a few bastards too!!

Carlos Ace · 13 November 2002, 01:54

I still remember some of them in my early days with an Amiga, like "The Lamer Exterminator".

Djay · 13 November 2002, 02:10

Quote:

I still remember some of them in my early days with an Amiga, like "The Lamer Exterminator".

the first time i ever did a virus scan of my floppy disks... nearly all had the dreaded Lamer Exterminator virus, i didn't actually know what viruses were about at the time. A friend of mine gave me a new utils disk and i was sitting there loading each of the apps to see what they did..(i think the disk was a frodo disk?!?). I ran the virus scanner (not sure what it was called)... and found millions of viruses on my disks...

... from that moment on i was carefull about how i managed my disks... you live and learn

Dizzy · 13 November 2002, 02:54

I remeber the viruskiller with the gun, so you could shoot the virus, that was a pretty cool feature.. not as boring as Nortons (but ok not as effektive)

jmmijo · 13 November 2002, 06:33

I remember this app that Discovery software came out with, V.I.P. aka Virus Infection Protection. It would archive your boot block and then store them in a database file which you could descibe and name according to the title. This is only good for those custom boot loader games and/or demos as any normal disk could be re-installed with a proper boot block.

I remember them giving a special offer for discovery titles that if you purchased this utility and register it you could get a backup copy of a Discovery game for something like $5.00 US. I remember archiving many bootblocks from all my Psygnosis and Discovery titles because it did save a couple of them for sure

Twistin'Ghost · 13 November 2002, 11:16

Yup, this program inspired me back then to try designing my own proggy called DVCS (Deluxe Virus Construction Set), but I never saw it through and only used it for archiving my fav viruii.

Drake1009 · 13 November 2002, 12:06

I never had the joy of virus hunting back in the day. Was once struck with a virus about half a year ago with something downloaded from Aminet I think it was but that's about it. Quick scan removed viruses from 2 files.

Djay · 13 November 2002, 23:20

i bought a copy of Worms (Amiga) of a bloke on Ebay.... did a virus scan found 2 infected files... maybe i should of back-up'ed the viruses before deletion

Twistin'Ghost · 14 November 2002, 04:58

Quote:

Originally posted by Djay
i bought a copy of Worms (Amiga) of a bloke on Ebay.... did a virus scan found 2 infected files... maybe i should of back-up'ed the viruses before deletion

I would have...

bippym · 14 November 2002, 10:55

I only ever had 1 virus and that was harmless

It just infected the bootblock on disks and when you inserted an infected disk, it'd load into memory and when you reset just put a message in the middle of the screen, sadly this was 11 yrs ago and i can't remember what it said!

Anybody else know?

Jan · 14 November 2002, 12:26

could it be the BGS9 virus? I remember a sentence like "piracy is a crime" or something like that.

The worst virus I ever had (which really infected nearly my whole diskbox and caused a lot of damage) was the Saddam virus. There was a time back in the early 90's when nearly each and every disk I received from friends and swapping partners was infected with this bastard. It was a relief when the first killer came out, called Schwarzkopf

.

Djay · 14 November 2002, 13:59

the Saddam was a complete bastard of a virus

bippym · 14 November 2002, 15:55

Quote:

Originally posted by Nazgûl
could it be the BGS9 virus? I remember a sentence like "piracy is a crime" or something like that.

No it was some guys name, in a red (or yellow!!) box in the middle of the screen.

Bit like a Guru but bigger and in the middle!

Twistin'Ghost · 15 November 2002, 03:55

Only one virus ever launched on me, on my A2000. Had just gotten a couple of tapes, plus floppies (Quarterback volumes) of new warez from some cheesy little pirate BBS. After booting one of the disks, it rebooted the machine, followed by a nice Euro demo style message telling me my HD was gone. In a panic, I powered down, but it was too late. Indeed my HD was toasted. So I took a floppy of Quarterback (an old version) and booted up, unformatted my HD, then restored it (somehow). Lost very few files, if any (I didn't notice anything missing). Quite a shocker for a couple of hours, though.

Beyond that, I always had DMS and WRP's of all my stuff, so I never worried about what happened to the floppy versions themselves. Even still, I still knew to keep them write-protected. Only saw the Saddam virus once and it was on an already too late copy of Escape From Colditz. I managed to capture it, but never got the big kahuna prize virus (the Fuck virus...what a nasty beastie that bitch was!) If anyone has a copy, it should be on my MIA.

Jan · 15 November 2002, 09:28

Quote:

Originally posted by Twistin'Ghost
I managed to capture it, but never got the big kahuna prize virus (the Fuck virus...what a nasty beastie that bitch was!) If anyone has a copy, it should be on my MIA.

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

jmmijo · 15 November 2002, 15:44

Quote:

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

The Virus Help Team sites should have info about this and all Amiga related virus's. The Danish site is down for reconstruction right now so here's the link to the Canadian site.

http://vht-can.shadow-realm.org/main.html

DPainter · 15 November 2002, 18:23

I remember getting the SCA virus and feeling very perplexed as to what it was and where it came from. It was this virus that kept screwing up the custom boot-block loader that Jim Sachs was writing for his 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea game.

Wasn't there another virus that changed your pointer into a ding dong?

15 November 2002, 18:51

After reading this I decided to check all my disks for viruses, since they are all second hand. I got four non-original disks with my A600: One is a copy of Wordsworth, one is its Dictionary, one is some Z system copying disk?, and the other is 'CU38', a think its a copy of a coverdisk. It has a virus checker on it. When you double click it opens a bar that says John Veldthuis Version 5.37. Then whenever you put a disk in it checks it(or it says it is anyway).
One disk, the copying disk I think, said Non standard Boot code. I clicked Learn assuming it would tell me more information. It said are you sure, so I said yes, then it came up with an error message about a brain a something? I am hoping somebody knows what I did to the disk cos the error message didnt come up after that. My Silly Putty disk 2 also has a Non-Standard Boot Code. Could this be a virus?
Does anybody know how to use this program properly, and also, how good is version 5.37? I think it might be outdated. The disk also has Transwrite on it, whatever that is.

Marcuz · 16 November 2002, 13:33

@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 · 16 November 2002, 15:03

Quote:

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 · 16 November 2002, 16:03

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.

23 June 2008, 23:59

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 · 24 June 2008, 00:16

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?

24 June 2008, 10:32

Quote:

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 · 24 June 2008, 10:42

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 · 24 June 2008, 10:51

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 · 24 June 2008, 10:58

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 · 24 June 2008, 23:06

Quote:

Originally Posted by Djay

the Saddam was a complete bastard of a virus

that barsteward still gives me nightmares

25 June 2008, 03:17

Quote:

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 · 26 June 2008, 16:04

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 · 26 June 2008, 19:05

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

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

chiark · 27 June 2008, 11:55

That'll have been Saddam, then

. Reet bastid, as noted above!

12 November 2002, 22:14	#1
Ziaxx Zone Friend Join Date: Aug 2001 Location: Sweden Age: 39 Posts: 87	15 year anniversary Something wonderful has happened Your AMIGA is alive!!! and even better Some of your disks are infected by a VIRUS Another masterpiece of the Mega-Mighty SCA That looks familiar to anyone? I was reading some Swedish PC magazine today at the library, the name of the magazine is Datormagazin, which is also the name of a former C64/Amiga magazine from the late 80s and early 90s. They had a picture in the magazine of the front cover of the issue from November 87, and it read something like "First Amiga virus discovered" or something. So then it struck me, this year (maybe even this month) it's 15 years since the infamous SCA virus first arrived on many people's floppies! I can't believe it's been that long! 15 years! I still remember that as if it was yesterday (well almost anyway), guess I've been getting old lately!

13 November 2002, 01:54	#4
Carlos Ace Junior Member Join Date: Jul 2001 Location: Lusitania Posts: 342	I still remember some of them in my early days with an Amiga, like "The Lamer Exterminator". __________________ *CARLOS ACE*

13 November 2002, 11:16	#8
Twistin'Ghost Give up the ghost Join Date: Apr 2001 Location: U$A Age: 22 Posts: 4,662	Yup, this program inspired me back then to try designing my own proggy called DVCS (Deluxe Virus Construction Set), but I never saw it through and only used it for archiving my fav viruii. Attached Thumbnails

15 November 2002, 18:51	#20
NytroX86 Posts: n/a	After reading this I decided to check all my disks for viruses, since they are all second hand. I got four non-original disks with my A600: One is a copy of Wordsworth, one is its Dictionary, one is some Z system copying disk?, and the other is 'CU38', a think its a copy of a coverdisk. It has a virus checker on it. When you double click it opens a bar that says John Veldthuis Version 5.37. Then whenever you put a disk in it checks it(or it says it is anyway). One disk, the copying disk I think, said Non standard Boot code. I clicked Learn assuming it would tell me more information. It said are you sure, so I said yes, then it came up with an error message about a brain a something? I am hoping somebody knows what I did to the disk cos the error message didnt come up after that. My Silly Putty disk 2 also has a Non-Standard Boot Code. Could this be a virus? Does anybody know how to use this program properly, and also, how good is version 5.37? I think it might be outdated. The disk also has Transwrite on it, whatever that is. Last edited by NytroX86; 16 November 2002 at 00:22.

24 June 2008, 00:16	#25
TCD Moderator Join Date: Sep 2006 Location: Germany Age: 35 Posts: 22,484	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? __________________ "I am Polka and that's why I don't like accordions" - CrazyOne, April 2013

13 November 2002, 00:43	#2
Dizzy DEAD Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: . Posts: 3,399	Should we have a party for SCA

13 November 2002, 01:47	#3
Djay breakpointUK.com Join Date: May 2001 Location: Brighton, UK Age: 37 Posts: 3,063	funny how Amiga viruses are as famous as the software they infected.... i remember a few bastards too!!

13 November 2002, 02:54	#6
Dizzy DEAD Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: . Posts: 3,399	I remeber the viruskiller with the gun, so you could shoot the virus, that was a pretty cool feature.. not as boring as Nortons (but ok not as effektive)

13 November 2002, 06:33	#7
jmmijo Junior Member Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: PDX Age: 51 Posts: 2,338	I remember this app that Discovery software came out with, V.I.P. aka Virus Infection Protection. It would archive your boot block and then store them in a database file which you could descibe and name according to the title. This is only good for those custom boot loader games and/or demos as any normal disk could be re-installed with a proper boot block. I remember them giving a special offer for discovery titles that if you purchased this utility and register it you could get a backup copy of a Discovery game for something like $5.00 US. I remember archiving many bootblocks from all my Psygnosis and Discovery titles because it did save a couple of them for sure

13 November 2002, 12:06	#9
Drake1009 Registered User Join Date: Jul 2001 Location: Denmark Posts: 2,284	I never had the joy of virus hunting back in the day. Was once struck with a virus about half a year ago with something downloaded from Aminet I think it was but that's about it. Quick scan removed viruses from 2 files.

13 November 2002, 23:20	#10
Djay breakpointUK.com Join Date: May 2001 Location: Brighton, UK Age: 37 Posts: 3,063	i bought a copy of Worms (Amiga) of a bloke on Ebay.... did a virus scan found 2 infected files... maybe i should of back-up'ed the viruses before deletion

14 November 2002, 10:55	#12
bippym Global Moderator Join Date: Nov 2001 Location: Derby, UK Age: 37 Posts: 8,141	I only ever had 1 virus and that was harmless It just infected the bootblock on disks and when you inserted an infected disk, it'd load into memory and when you reset just put a message in the middle of the screen, sadly this was 11 yrs ago and i can't remember what it said! Anybody else know?

14 November 2002, 12:26	#13
Jan Junior Member Join Date: Aug 2002 Location: here Posts: 140	could it be the BGS9 virus? I remember a sentence like "piracy is a crime" or something like that. The worst virus I ever had (which really infected nearly my whole diskbox and caused a lot of damage) was the Saddam virus. There was a time back in the early 90's when nearly each and every disk I received from friends and swapping partners was infected with this bastard. It was a relief when the first killer came out, called Schwarzkopf .

14 November 2002, 13:59	#14
Djay breakpointUK.com Join Date: May 2001 Location: Brighton, UK Age: 37 Posts: 3,063	the Saddam was a complete bastard of a virus

15 November 2002, 03:55	#16
Twistin'Ghost Give up the ghost Join Date: Apr 2001 Location: U$A Age: 22 Posts: 4,662	Only one virus ever launched on me, on my A2000. Had just gotten a couple of tapes, plus floppies (Quarterback volumes) of new warez from some cheesy little pirate BBS. After booting one of the disks, it rebooted the machine, followed by a nice Euro demo style message telling me my HD was gone. In a panic, I powered down, but it was too late. Indeed my HD was toasted. So I took a floppy of Quarterback (an old version) and booted up, unformatted my HD, then restored it (somehow). Lost very few files, if any (I didn't notice anything missing). Quite a shocker for a couple of hours, though. Beyond that, I always had DMS and WRP's of all my stuff, so I never worried about what happened to the floppy versions themselves. Even still, I still knew to keep them write-protected. Only saw the Saddam virus once and it was on an already too late copy of Escape From Colditz. I managed to capture it, but never got the big kahuna prize virus (the Fuck virus...what a nasty beastie that bitch was!) If anyone has a copy, it should be on my MIA.

15 November 2002, 18:23	#19
DPainter Junior Member Join Date: Apr 2001 Location: California Posts: 339	I remember getting the SCA virus and feeling very perplexed as to what it was and where it came from. It was this virus that kept screwing up the custom boot-block loader that Jim Sachs was writing for his 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea game. Wasn't there another virus that changed your pointer into a ding dong?

16 November 2002, 13:33	#21
Marcuz Wurk??? Join Date: Jun 2002 Location: . Age: 37 Posts: 4,742	@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?

16 November 2002, 16:03	#23
Ziaxx Zone Friend Join Date: Aug 2001 Location: Sweden Age: 39 Posts: 87	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.

23 June 2008, 23:59	#24
massen Posts: n/a	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!

24 June 2008, 10:42	#27
TCD Moderator Join Date: Sep 2006 Location: Germany Age: 35 Posts: 22,484	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 __________________ "I am Polka and that's why I don't like accordions" - CrazyOne, April 2013

24 June 2008, 10:51	#28
Shoonay Global Caturator Join Date: Aug 2004 Location: Porando Posts: 5,844	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... __________________ "I used to be an Amiga user, then I took an arrow in the knee."

24 June 2008, 10:58	#29
chiark Needs a life Join Date: Jan 2008 Location: England Posts: 1,565	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!)

26 June 2008, 16:04	#32
chiark Needs a life Join Date: Jan 2008 Location: England Posts: 1,565	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

26 June 2008, 19:05	#33
Sune Salminen Dinamáquina Join Date: May 2002 Location: BH/Brasil Age: 38 Posts: 362	What was the name of the virus that took over 'disk validator'? I lost some of my best Oktalyzer music to that virus.

27 June 2008, 11:55	#34
chiark Needs a life Join Date: Jan 2008 Location: England Posts: 1,565	That'll have been Saddam, then . Reet bastid, as noted above!

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