[COFF] Happy birthday, Michelangelo virus!

Rudi Blom rudi.j.blom at gmail.com
Wed Mar 6 12:14:05 AEST 2019


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?


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