Retro Macintosh viruses still exist?
Posted: Sat Sep 29, 2012 8:24 ama few days ago i came across a Mac anti-virus program in a floopy disk image (.dsk) called Disinfectent 3.7.1.
i figured i would run it and scan one of the HDD images (.hfv) that i use for one of my Mac emulators. so expecting it to find nothing, i start a scan of the HDD image and go into another room for a few minutes. when i come back, i read the status report and to my disbelief the report says that mutiple files in the HDD image are infected with the nVIR virus. the A and B versions to be specific. so i look on Wikipedia and it says that the virus has been around sice 1987. WTF!!! so i scan the rest of my HDD images and they too are infected. so after 45 min and 10 HDD images later i finaly wipe the virus out and i can stop stressing. right? nope, i scaned a few of my floppy disk images and the programs on them are too infected. HOLY SHIT!! so after about an hour i finaly wiped out all traces of the viruses and traced the origin of the viruses to a floppy disk image that i got from a web site, i'm not going to name the site as doing so would put a black eye on all sites that carry .dsk/.hfv files. and no, i didn't get the infected disk image from theoldcomputer.com. so you can stop panicing HT. but don't let this discourage you from downloading .dsk/.hfv files. when you downlod these files, go ahead and mount them in your prefered Macintosh emulator and before you run the program that is contained in the .dsk/.hfv file, run an anti-virus scan on the virtual disk/drive to make sure that it's clean. and if you do find a virus, please tell the people that run the site where you got the infected file from so that they can stem the spread of the virus. here is the url for the Wikipedia article on the nVIR mac virus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVIR
i figured i would run it and scan one of the HDD images (.hfv) that i use for one of my Mac emulators. so expecting it to find nothing, i start a scan of the HDD image and go into another room for a few minutes. when i come back, i read the status report and to my disbelief the report says that mutiple files in the HDD image are infected with the nVIR virus. the A and B versions to be specific. so i look on Wikipedia and it says that the virus has been around sice 1987. WTF!!! so i scan the rest of my HDD images and they too are infected. so after 45 min and 10 HDD images later i finaly wipe the virus out and i can stop stressing. right? nope, i scaned a few of my floppy disk images and the programs on them are too infected. HOLY SHIT!! so after about an hour i finaly wiped out all traces of the viruses and traced the origin of the viruses to a floppy disk image that i got from a web site, i'm not going to name the site as doing so would put a black eye on all sites that carry .dsk/.hfv files. and no, i didn't get the infected disk image from theoldcomputer.com. so you can stop panicing HT. but don't let this discourage you from downloading .dsk/.hfv files. when you downlod these files, go ahead and mount them in your prefered Macintosh emulator and before you run the program that is contained in the .dsk/.hfv file, run an anti-virus scan on the virtual disk/drive to make sure that it's clean. and if you do find a virus, please tell the people that run the site where you got the infected file from so that they can stem the spread of the virus. here is the url for the Wikipedia article on the nVIR mac virus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVIR
