trebor@biar.UUCP (Robert J Woodhead) (04/01/89)
I have just gotten off the phone with a VIREX user at a major corporation. He had an unusual thing happen to him that has me seriously concerned. I want to emphasize that this report is UNCONFIRMED. The user is doing tests and has promised to report results to me tonight. I will post a followup message as soon as I can. Here is what happened: The user booted his machine, heard what he described as "a melody", and his machine crashed. He could not reboot. When he rebooted from floppy, his hard disk was smashed. What makes this significant is that according to him, this machine had it's system clock set forward one day; that is, it read "April 1, 1989". This raises the possibility of a new, malevolent virus that goes off on April Fools Day. It is possible, even likely, that this is a coincidence, and not a virus. However, I am sufficiently concerned that I am posting this notice to warn people. Until more is known, I STRONGLY SUGGEST YOU SET THE CLOCK BACK ON YOUR MACS BY ONE WEEK OR MORE. Do not let your Mac's boot with a System Date of April 1. Boot off locked System Master Floppies and set your date and time back. As reports come in, I will post new information to the net. As for me, I am hoping that this is not a virus. -- * Robert J Woodhead * The true meaning of life is cunningly encrypted and * * uunet!biar!trebor * hidden somewhere in this signature... * * Biar Games, Inc. * ...no, go back and look again *
trebor@biar.UUCP (Robert J Woodhead) (04/01/89)
The user that reported the hard disk trash has been unable to replicate the problem on several machines that were networked to the machine which lost it's hard disk. However, he reports that one of his engineers ran some new software (name unknown at this time) on the machine that died just before it went down. Unfortunately, my source cannot contact the engineer in question to get more information until Monday. Based on the (sketchy, to be sure) information I have, I don't think it's a virus. It is either a hardware problem, or it is a trojan horse. While I am tending towards the belief that it was just a hardware problem with a scarey set of circumstances, I still think it may be prudent to keep your system date from turning to April 1 for a while. If there are any viruses or Trojans set to trigger on April 1, best to wait and find out rather than get caught. I hope this is a false alarm; but better safe than sorry. If anyone hears of any reports of disk smashing on April 1, I would appreciate getting details. -- * Robert J Woodhead * The true meaning of life is cunningly encrypted and * * uunet!biar!trebor * hidden somewhere in this signature... * * Biar Games, Inc. * ...no, go back and look again *