Just how vulnerable PC's have become in the internet!!

[Fester]

amije wrote:
amiga scene was full of viruses when amiga was the top in the market, so don't blame pcs for this, but the guys which make them. as they say, the scorer gets the cheerleader :-)

Does anyone remember the SCA virus on Amiga? Not even a week after getting my first A2000 in the 80s, did I start seeing this thing pop-up on the screen. It would blank out the screen and then it would tell you that a wonderful thing had happened, that "your Amiga was alive...another mighty trick from the SCA.". Then, the silly virus would dammage the diskette.

This virus was apparently shipped _with_ the Amigas. There was an article and a fix for it in one of the issues of the AmigaWorld magazine.

I don't believe humans have been able to build the bug-free, defect-free, 100% virus-proof computer yet...

Fester

[Fester]

Piru wrote:
SCA does not wipe anything or damage the disk when it activates. It just spreads, and displays the message every 15th reboot.

By replacing the bootblock of the disk it can destroy game loaders though. But everyone kept the original disks in safe place, write protected, right? :-)

Don't misunderstand me. I didn't mean that the diskettes would crash and burn in a puff of smoke and a raging flame of fire. No sparks ever flew out of my disk drives. Thanks for the clarification. I do need to lean to express myself more better. :-)

However, if my memory serves me correctly, something did happen to material on my diskettes. I always thought this virus had something to do with these diskette problems.

Here's a quote from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCA_virus.

"SCA would not harm disks per-se, but would spread to any write-enabled floppies inserted. If they used custom bootblocks (such as games), they would be rendered unusable. SCA also checksums as an original filesystem (OFS) bootblock so would destroy newer filesystems if the user didn't know the proper use of the "install" command to remove SCA ("install df0: FFS FORCE" to recover a 'fast filesystem' floppy)." - Wikipedia

I think I experienced this a few times...Oh well. Dassa long tyme agew.

Fester