77 My scanner finds the Filler and/or Israeli Boot virus in memory, but after I boot from a clean floppy it reports no viruses. Am I infected?
Description
This article is from the Computer Viruses FAQ, by Nick FitzGerald n.fitzgerald@csc.canterbury.ac.nz with numerous contributions by others.
77 My scanner finds the Filler and/or Israeli Boot virus in memory, but after I boot from a clean floppy it reports no viruses. Am I infected?
This is almost certainly a "false positive" (see C5). One particular,
popular antivirus product (usually its TSR scanner/monitor VSAFE) leaves
its scan strings in memory in an unencoded form, and is well-known for
causing false positives on Filler and Israeli Boot. Your other scanner
sees the first's scan strings (at least those for Filler and/or Israeli
Boot) and reports a virus in memory. When you boot from a floppy you
(probably) are not loading the resident scanner, so it doesn't have a
chance to "booby-trap" your other scanner. To fix this problem, try
adding "REM " to the beginning of the line in your AUTOEXEC.BAT or
CONFIG.SYS file that loads the suspect TSR, and see if the problem
disappears.
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