44 Do the protection systems in DR DOS work against viruses?
Description
This article is from the Computer Viruses FAQ, by Nick FitzGerald n.fitzgerald@csc.canterbury.ac.nz with numerous contributions by others.
44 Do the protection systems in DR DOS work against viruses?
Partially. Neither the password file/directory protection available
from DR DOS version 5 onwards, nor the secure disk partitions from DR
DOS 6 were intended to combat viruses, but they do so to some extent.
If you have DR DOS, it is very wise to password-protect your files (to
stop accidental damage too), but don't depend on it as your only means
of defense.
The use of the password command (e.g. PASSWORD/W:MINE *.EXE *.COM) will
stop more viruses than the plain DOS attribute facility (see D5), but
that isn't saying much! The combination of the password system plus a
disk compression system may be more secure, because to bypass the
password system a virus must access the disk directly, but under
SuperStor or Stacker the physical disk will be meaningless to a virus.
There may be some viruses that, rather than invisibly infecting files on
compressed disks, very visibly corrupt such disks.
The main use of the "secure disk partitions" system, introduced in
DR DOS 6, is to stop people from fiddling with your hard disk while you
are away from the PC. The way this is implemented, however, may also
help against a few viruses that look for DOS partitions on a disk.
Furthermore, DR DOS is not fully compatible with MS/PC-DOS, especially
when you get down to the low-level tricks that some viruses use. For
instance, some internal memory structures are "read-only" in the sense
that they are constantly updated (for MS/PC-DOS compatibility) but not
really used by DR DOS, so even if a sophisticated virus modifies them,
it will not have any effect, or at least not that intended by the
virus's author.
In general, using a less compatible system diminishes the number of
existing viruses that can infect it. For instance, the introduction of
hard disks made the Brain virus almost disappear; the introduction of
the 80286 and DOS 4.0+ made the Yale and Ping Pong viruses next to
extinct, and so on.
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