Comments on: Boot Virus Stoned.Angelina on Medion Laptops sold at Food Discounter Aldi

By: 5h4D0\/\/ hun73r

5h4D0\/\/ hun73r — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 22:46:12 +0000

ive recently encountered the stoned virus on a emachines T1090 that has mutated so far with the worms hydras and spiders trojans that its not funny any one have and ideas how to get it off and on to a CD let me know thank you. no matter how hard ive tryed it has been able to rereplicate it self and even change its coding while i try to f-disk the thing we might be facing a new gen of cpu virus’

By: Toralv Dirro

Toralv Dirro — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 19:10:40 +0000

Nothing to add to Vesselin’s comment, of course. It’s the full technical correct description!

Actually you may not even see a message about replacing the disk with a bootable one, when the copy of the original boot sector on the floppy disk has been overwritten at a later time. After all it’s the loader in the boot sector that determines there is no system on the floppy to boot from and puts out a message.

Depending on the virus it may or may not have infected the hard disk immediately, before crashing the machine when trying to execute the destroyed copy of the original boot sector.

By: Vesselin Bontchev

Vesselin Bontchev — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 19:29:36 +0000

“The only way to infect a hard disk with a boot virus is by actually booting from an infected floppy.”

Aw, c’mon, Toralv, after all these years at the VTC and then at Dr. Solomon’s/McAfee, I’d expect you to know better.

All that is required to infect the hard disk is to *forget* a (not necessarily bootable) infected floppy disk in the A: drive of the computer at boot time – and, of course, the BIOS has to be configured to try to boot from the floppy disk first.

By the time you get the message that the floppy disk is not bootable, the hard disk is already infected.