Viruses

[Ilwrath]

Regarding my home account, virus-infected emails are coming at me at such a rate, even on Amiga Mailing lists, that I am giving notice here that I have begun using my provider's spamblocker software to block the addresses of those whose accounts are spreading these viruses, based soley on whether or not I recognize the address. Although I have been getting some from the PageStream folks, I recognize that address, so they won't be blocked. If your account is sending out these viruses, and I don't recognize your address, you will be blocked from my account.

Billsey-
I'm assuming you're complaining about Sobig.f - it's running rampent out there - I've cleared about a 100 out of my own inboxes over the past few days.  Anyhow, keep in mind, the newer viruses (such as sobig.f) forge the from: and reply-to: fields to random values found on OTHER CLEAN MESSAGES from the victim's inbox.  So, likely, the names you're blocking don't have anything to do with the virus, other than having recently sent the victim a clean e-mail.

If you want to block e-mail from people you don't know, you'd probably be better off going to a complete white-list system, rather than blocking the random addresses that may or may not have anything to do with a spam/virus, other than being forged as a from field.

[Ilwrath]

Anyway, has anybody here been wiped out by an Amiga virus? I recall getting one that infected the first file in startup-sequence, and that affected a couple of disks before I picked up on it. I also got one one my HD - the first and last one that infected it - and that was years ago, five or more. I can't remember what the virus did, but as I was running VirusZ it was picked up on the first reboot and quickly eliminated.

Heh!  I've gotten two Amiga viruses that actually did damage.  Though, both were over 10 years ago, now... heh!  

First, and I'm embarassed to admit it....  LAMER EXTERMINATOR (a bootblock/cold capture vector) virus did in a few diskettes about a week after I picked up my machine, thanks to a local BBS.  That's when I realized it was wise to run VirusChecker, and learn a little bit more about this computer.  It's more complex than a C64, for sure!!   hehe!  

Later, I got hit with Saddam virus...  Remember that one?  The little bastard hid in Workbench 1.2/1.3's "disk-validator" and would copy itself to any standard AmigaOS floppy that previously had a disk-validator file on it (most 1.2/1.3 app disks!), making that disk a carrier of the virus.  It would also randomly corrupt a track or two on any disk....  (causing the disk to go unvalidated, and the virus'd disk-validator to run).  I must have been "lucky" enough to get that one the day it came out, or so...  I knew right away I was dealing with a virus, and I knew it wasn't a bootblock or standard virus, but I couldn't figure out what the heck it actually WAS.  About a day after I started realizing exactly how deadly the thing was, the first news of how to get rid of it finally started showing up...

Ahh... some info about Saddam Virus...

The good ole' days... haha!