stevep@galadriel.bt.co.uk (Steve Paine) (02/23/90)
news@uncmed.med.unc.edu (Usenet News Account) writes: > The Amiga world is already the unfortunate victim of a virus that was >apparantly meant as an attack on pirates called "lamers", hence the name >Lamer Exterminator. It works by screwing up diskcopies (only) by, I >believe, writing the word "LAMER" to random blocks during a diskcopy. >Needless to say this virus rapidly escaped the bounds of pirates and is in >the general Amiga community. I am not sure who I would consider the >bigger scumbuckets, big time pirates or destructive virus programmers, >so it is hard to decide the lesser of these two evils. Tell me about it. I got the LAMER virus from somewhere, and it got on to one of my development disks. The worst thing about it was that I had just bought a second hand disk drive and I put the disk error messages down to the new drive needing allignment. After some 2 MONTHS of extra backups (obviously making the problem worse) I had so many errors that it was getting rediculous. Out came the disk editor and there was the LAMER!LAMER!LAMER!LAMER block. SHIT! By using combinations of backups the only thing I lost was time, but at least it taught me to forget 'It will never happen to me' syndrome! - VIRUSX3.2 caught it on over 70% of my disks after I started using it! To be honest i'm more annoyed at myself for not having a virus exterminator than the mindless berk who put it there in the first place. Thank you and goodnight! Steve Paine.