On Tue, 2007-08-07 at 13:42 -0400, James Knott wrote:
A boot sector virus is executed every time the computer is booted. Any OS can be vulnerable to a boot sector virus during booting, because the OS is not running at that time. The only protection is what's provided with the BIOS. On the other hand computers running protected operating systems, such as Linux or OS/2 cannot be infected when running, as they have mechanisms to prevent it. DOS and DOS based versions of Windows (3.1, 95, 98 etc) do not have such protection and can be infected whenever the virus is run.
MY PII was thus infected because I multi boot with Win311 for legacy apps. Rewriting the MBR from SuSE8.2 at the time did not cure the problem. It was a harmless variant of a known virus which I defeated with Fprot and hard rebooting. At the time using FProt in the recommended way found the virus in memory and therefore refused to clean the infection. I beat this problem by telling FProt to ignore memory and to do the clean then I immediately rebooted. I did this three times then ran FProt in the usual way and no virus was found. From then on I made Linux the default boot and load data from media therein. To protect the anti virus software I kept it zipped in a location not in the PATH and used a script to break out and run the program in a directory I make up at that time. There is not much you can do with such legacy systems but the exorcise in paranoia is healthy. -- ___ _ _ _ ____ _ _ _ | | | | [__ | | | |___ |_|_| ___] | \/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org