28 What does the virus do? (Computer virus)
Description
This article is from the Computer Viruses FAQ, by Nick FitzGerald n.fitzgerald@csc.canterbury.ac.nz with numerous contributions by others.
28 What does the virus do? (Computer virus)
If an antivirus program has detected a virus on your computer, don't
rush to post a question to this list asking what it does. First, it
might be a false positive alert (especially if the virus is found only
in one file--see C5), and second, some viruses are extremely common, so
questions like "What does the Jerusalem virus do?" or "What does the
Stoned virus do?" are asked here repeatedly. While this list is read by
several antivirus experts, they get tired of perpetually answering the
same questions over and over again. In any case, if you really need to
know what a particular virus does (as opposed to knowing enough to get
rid of it), you will need a longer treatise than could be given here.
For example, the Stoned virus replaces the disk's boot record with its
own, relocating the original to a sector on the disk that may (or may
not) occur in an unused portion of the root directory of a DOS diskette;
when active, it sits in an area a few kilobytes below the top of memory.
All this description could apply to a number of common viruses; but the
important points of where the original boot sector goes--and what effect
that has on networking software, non-DOS partitions, and so on--are all
major questions in themselves.
Therefore, it is better if you first try to answer your question
yourself. There are several sources of information about the known
computer viruses, so please consult one of them before requesting
information publicly. Chances are that your virus is rather well known
and that it is already described in detail in at least one of these
sources (see A6 for some help in finding these.)
Continue to:
My Books
