nVIR Assassin, by Pete Gontier, November and December 1988
kudos, complaints, and bug reports to:
Bloated Toad Software
Microcomputer Labs UCSB
1521 Phelps Hall
Santa Barbara, CA 93106
⌐ Copyright 1988 the Regents of the University of California
Portions ⌐ Copyright 1988 Symantec Corp.
This program is designed to scan volumes on a search and destroy mission for the nVIR virus. It is fairly self-explanatory: run it, and it will tell you what it's doing as it does it. A few things, however, should be noted.
The program was written with a university-type laboratory setting in mind. What this means that one of the design factors was to take into consideration hundreds upon hundreds of disks which might occaisionally need sweeping (fortunately, this is not yet a reality, at least at our facility). If it is inconvenient for any reason, please consider this notion before deciding the interface is flawed.
The Eject button in the opening dialog WILL eject a hard drive. This is a feature, not a bug. The Eject button will, in fact, eject anything it can get its hands on but the startup volume.
You cannot check the Startup volume. Strictly speaking, "Startup volume" is a misnomer. The volume nVIR Assassin won't check is the volume with the currently active System on it. Most often, this happens to be the volume the Mac started up from, but not always.
The Abort function (invoked by hitting command-. during a volume scan) will NOT react until it is finished processing whatever file it has its mitts on at the moment. This means that once you see the name of the file, it's going to be processed. There is no way to avoid this, because aborting in the middle of a file would most likely leave it corrupted and cause the Mac to crash.
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Some history about nVIR, all of it hearsay:
The nVIR virus started in West Germany, in a university professor's office. He was studying the phenomenon of viruses in general when an SE was stolen out of his lab. This is why nVIR is not particularly damaging: the only thing it does besides reproduce itself is keep track of how many times it has done so. However, under some circumstances, this can take up a significant amount of space on a disk and can also cause printing problems.
Unfortunately, there are rumors to the effect that this professor published the source code to his virus! This means that there can be (and probably are) strains of nVIR out there in the big wide world which are more damaging and harder to kill. I have heard of two, so far. One is the original version. The other was reported in MacWeek and is apparently a bit harder to kill off, but I have taken measures to take care of this. I think.
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Further recommendations:
" Vaccine", from CE Software. It is a free INIT which asks you to confirm certain sensitive reource changes while other progams are running. This can allow you to avoid infection by most any virus, although it is NOT foolproof.
"Ferret", an application like nVIR Assassin which scans drives to repair them from "Scores" infections.
"Interferon", an application which scans drives looking for a number of different viruses and "shady" files and optionally deletes infectees.
All these programs are available as shareware or freeware on bulletin boards and national on-line services.
The clincher:
If you would like comprehensive repair services for disks which you suspect might already be infected, make sure you get a copy of "Virex", from HJC Software, @ $99.95 list. Their phone number is 919-490-1277. This program eradicates Scores, nVIR, and Sneak, and will be updated to take care of other Macintosh viruses as they appear. Remember, nVIR Assassin was written for the immediate needs of a university laboratory, and will not be updated if I can possibly avoid it!
