From dave at horsfall.org Wed Mar 6 09:34:14 2019 From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Wed, 6 Mar 2019 10:34:14 +1100 (EST) Subject: [COFF] Happy birthday, Michelangelo virus! Message-ID: 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 From krewat at kilonet.net Wed Mar 6 10:29:22 2019 From: krewat at kilonet.net (Arthur Krewat) Date: Tue, 5 Mar 2019 19:29:22 -0500 Subject: [COFF] Happy birthday, Michelangelo virus! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: 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 > _______________________________________________ > COFF mailing list > COFF at minnie.tuhs.org > https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff > From rudi.j.blom at gmail.com Wed Mar 6 12:14:05 2019 From: rudi.j.blom at gmail.com (Rudi Blom) Date: Wed, 6 Mar 2019 09:14:05 +0700 Subject: [COFF] Happy birthday, Michelangelo virus! Message-ID: 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? From dave at horsfall.org Wed Mar 6 13:52:00 2019 From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Wed, 6 Mar 2019 14:52:00 +1100 (EST) Subject: [COFF] Happy birthday, Michelangelo virus! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: 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