X PROTECT YOUR AMIGA FROM THE NEW TREATH OF VIRUS ATTACKS!X AN ORDINARY TUESDAYAs I was one day sitting in front of my computer - my beloved Amiga -
watching VirusZ check my files for those nasty viruses, a thought suddenly
presented itself to me. It was quite an ordinary Tuesday that this thought
appeared, I was just hanging around waiting for a pepperoni pizza, when I
was abruptly struck down by the thought: Where have all the virus-coders
gone? Where are their productions? Have we beaten them off? Is the fight
against the dreadful viruses won? THE STORYA couple of years ago, I believe we were all fighting back against those
awful viruses we had read about in magazines like Amiga Format, CU Amiga,
Amiga Shopper and others - now resting. To quote one of them, as an example
of what seems to have been a hysteria at the time: "Protect your Amiga from
the new threat of virus attack". Now doesn't that just sound intimidating?___So what triggered this mass-hysteria, and what drove it forth? To start with
the easy question; I think it was the result of our common fear of the
unknown - our fear of the grim reaper lurking behind the bushes. One has
to be aware of the fact that when viruses first began appearing, way back
in 1987 when the SCA-Virus appeared, there weren't a lot of people around
with competence to kill them off. Viruses such as the Saddam Hussein
Disk-Validator Virus infecting ones "Disk-validator" (As found in your L: directory) and The Lamer Exterminator Virus were tough viruses to handle at
the time, and it took quite some time before decent virus-killers could
cope with them, thus making them common amongst gamers world-wide. In fact,
one of the first viruses ever, beside the SCA virus and the ByteBandit
virus, the Disk-Herpes Virus, created the 22nd of July 1987, wasn't
discovered until the 21st of February 1990! If you think the
virus-situation of today is scary, try imagining a life where a virus can't
be killed before it's been floating around for 2, yes!, perhaps even 3 to 4
years! In other words; If you by any chance happened to catch a virus on
one of your disks, you had more than 3 years to spread it to the rest of
your disks, your friend's disks and your friend's friend disks (!), thus
making a lot of people very angry at you...___I can clearly remember the times, no matter how sparse they occurred, when
The Lamer Exterminator Virus hit my screen, and I was faced with a
blinking red box stating my lameness. ("It has come to my attention that
the person using this computer is a LAMER.") After that, my disk was
destroyed, and I was seriously pissed off! DRAWING A CONCLUSIONToday we can all laugh at these faded memories of yesterday. Nobody is
confronted by a serious virus these days, because we all have either the
latest version of VirusZ or of Virus Checker installed and running on our
machines. If we overlook the random attack made by a lame Happy New Year
Virus-clone, or the seldom found Link-virus, we are all free from "the new
threat of virus attack". (As stated in Cu Amiga some years ago) We need
not worry for our data, as it is secured by our various killers, thus
making our lives risk-free.___Now, approaching the main-subject of this article; take a minute to think
about all the lame attacks you've been confronted with by viruses. Take a
minute to think about The Lamer Exterminator, The Disk-Herpes, The Byte
Bandit, the Eleni-, the SCA-, the Saddam-, the Link-, the Happy New Year-,
the Joshua-, and the NoName-Virus. Recall their messages: "You've now got
your first virus", "Umyj Dupe - Wash Your Ass" and "Something wonderful has
happened" - don't you just miss them?___Don't you just miss the messages, the viruses, the anger of knowing "Hey, my
hard disk is being formatted right now!". Don't you just miss that special
feeling you get when your floppy starts producing smoke and your
floppy-drive is burning? I know I do...___I think we all do. Deep inside, deep within the boundaries of our hearts,
no-one can forget the oldskool feeling of having a virus resident in RAM. I
think we, the guys on the scene, love taking risks; hacking, phreaking,
copying, trading - doing something illegal - it's always been a part of
being a scener. Perhaps coding viruses has been too.___To end this article I can do nothing but encourage you to do one thing:
"Protect your Amiga from the new threat of virus attack!"
