kleef@cs.vu.nl (Patrick van Kleef) (07/12/87)
Although I don't think there's a large chance the program will make it across the Dutch borders, it can never harm to warn the ST-community about the presence of a so called Trojan Horse.. On my BBS in Amsterdam, Holland, a program has been uploaded that did in fact destroy the contents of some people's harddisks. It was described as a calcalutor with a very high accuracy (something like 300 decimals). Running this calculator produced nothing but a freshly cleaned harddisk. So watch out for a program that's called CALCULAT.ARC (or CALCULAT.BAS in its uncompressed form) and consists of a GfA Basic program. In it are poorly disguised routines named 'DESTROY' and other names that should make sirens sound, turn on red lights etc... In general: always turn off the harddisk when running a downloaded program, make regular back-ups and distrust downloads in general. Boy, am I glad I run my BBS on an PC-clone, uncapable of running ST-Trojans :)