[COFF] Happy birthday, Michelangelo virus!

[COFF] Happy birthday, Michelangelo virus!

[rudi.j.blom]

No details left, so not sure it was this particular virus, but a
customer running SCO UNIX on a DEC box left a DOS diskette in the
floppy drive and after the CRON scheduled nightly reboot (to clean up
application logs) the server found the diskette and started booting
from it. Staff arriving in the morning were wondering why their PCs
couldn't connect to the server.

Seems someone had forgotten to disable in the BIOS the booting from floppy.

Server was re-installed, booting from floppy disabled, about 200
servers spread over the country checked 'on site'!

Fast forward to the 'here and now' we still see regular warnings
posted about "don't stick a unknown USB memory stick in your PC or
notebook"

Nothing changes?

[COFF] Happy birthday, Michelangelo virus!

[dave]

On Wed, 6 Mar 2019, Rudi Blom wrote:

> Seems someone had forgotten to disable in the BIOS the booting from 
> floppy.

Guess who forgot to remove the OEM CD from a Thinkpad, and rebooted it?

I can't remember the details, but I was repairing the odd bad block; the 
box had FreeBSD on it, and I'd just downloaded an update over the net, 
rebooted, and walked off for a cup of coffee whilst it did its thing...

The damned thing assumed that silence meant consent, and started to format 
the drive; fortunately I'd just installed the base FreeBSD on it, without 
any further work.

These days I leave default boot from floppy/CD/etc disabled unless I need 
it.

-- Dave

[COFF] Happy birthday, Michelangelo virus!

[dave]

Commemorating Michelangelo's birthday in 1457, this was the scourge of 
DOS-box users everywhere in 1992 (I was still using CP/M at the time 
before upgrading to Unix).

-- Dave

[COFF] Happy birthday, Michelangelo virus!

[krewat]

I met up with that virus because a friend caught it from somewhere and I 
looked into it for him. Luckily he had done what I told him to do and 
that was to keep multiple backups. I was actually able to restore the 
hard drive intact, as it only deleted the beginning 100 sectors (thanks 
wikipedia).

I immediately told a bunch of people I knew, and Eric G Corley who I 
also knew invited me to speak on his radio program "Off the Wall" on 
WUSB-FM. I was unable to make it because of prior commitments.

 From there on, there were a few variants of the idea.

It taught me, and a lot of other people, not to boot from floppies that 
were not supposed to be booted from.

I think shortly after that, I wrote a boot sector scanner that would 
scan the floppies when they were first inserted.

art k.


On 3/5/2019 6:34 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> Commemorating Michelangelo's birthday in 1457, this was the scourge of 
> DOS-box users everywhere in 1992 (I was still using CP/M at the time 
> before upgrading to Unix).
>
> -- Dave
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