gahooten@ames.arc.nasa.gov (gahooten) (01/06/89)
In January, there will be a Friday the 13. Though I am not one to be superstitious, there is a Virus that loves this date. This letter is a warning about that virus, and about its impending trigger. The virus deletes the FAT on an IBM PC, and then does a "hard' reformat of the hard disk. Hard meaning that it replaces all sectors with a character as it reformats thus preventing the use of unformat commands. This is similar to how a floppy is reformatted. There are several ways to defeat this. One is to back up your system and reset the system date to Friday the 13. This will trigger the virus and warn you of its presence. Then you can take steps to deal with it. I.E. Look for the virus with checksums, or with chk4bomb.com that looks for the format command in a file. The other is to reset your clock on the 12th of January to the 14th. This will prevent the firing of the virus. Anyway, I wanted to warn all involved in the PC world about this threat. Please be careful, and don't get caught. Remember to always practice safe HEX. Greg Hooten.