..................................................By Don Knox
-- part contents for background part 1
----- text -----
VIRUS Stuff
I first came upon the notion of a virus not long after I bought my 512KE in mid-1987. A Canadian had written a small program that wrote a "Peace to the World" message on the screen at start-up. (I will admit to some fuzziness about the details of that.)
Since then, learning of the damage caused by less benign viruses, I have collected, and used, whatever virus detection programs I can obtain. As it happens most of these are public domain.
I will use this article to say "THANK YOU" to all of those individuals and groups who have labored over these programs and made them available to the world of people like me.
I have used: AntiVirus 1.0E, Assassin, Disinfectant 1.7, VirusWarning INIT, Ferret 1.1, HeapFixer‚Ñ¢, Interferen 3.1, Repair, Vaccination, Virus Rx, as well as "GateKeeper", all of which, I believe, are available from the AMUG library, and on the AMUG "Best-of-AntiVirus" disk. In addition I have purchased Virus Detective‚Ñ¢ (4.0.1) and VirusBlockade‚Ñ¢ (II 1.0) (by Jeffrey S. Shulman). These last three, plus the "VirusWarningInit" are in my system folder and on constant guard. In addition I have prepared a floppy with the above programs and a system so that I can test ALL new disks (including purchased disks and those from our library) with my hard disk turned OFF. I have been told that I am overly cautious. Perhaps so, but I have also had pointed out to me that
a person being paranoid doesn't mean that someone isn't out to
get him(her). In any event I have found only one virus (with
"Disinfectant") and removed it. I consider myself very fortunate.