79 What does the GenB and/or the GenP virus do?
Description
This article is from the Computer Viruses FAQ, by Nick FitzGerald n.fitzgerald@csc.canterbury.ac.nz with numerous contributions by others.
79 What does the GenB and/or the GenP virus do?
There is no such thing as *the* GenB or GenP virus. It is a heuristic
used by a very popular scanner to detect boot sector viruses and means
"There is something very suspicious in the boot sector (GenB) or in the
MBR (GenP), and I am pretty sure that it is a virus, however, I have no
idea which particular virus it might be". You should run a scanner
which has better recognition and identification capabilities (see B15),
if you want to know which particular virus you have. One advantage of
the GenB/GenP report is that you can often use the disinfection utility
from the same producer to remove the virus, even if no other scanner can
remove it. When told to remove the GenB/GenP "virus", the utility scans
the disk for something that looks like a saved copy of the original boot
sector or MBR and will put it back in place, thus removing the virus, or
it writes a good generic MBR if there is an apparently valid partition
table in the virus MBR.
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