engber@speedy.cs.wisc.edu (Mike Engber) (09/16/88)
Thanks to the people that replied. I don't have a panacea, but the idea of partioning the hard disks and locking up the partition with the system and the applications should work. The problem is that some applications want to write to the system folder or to their folder. So this may or may not work for your software set-up. For now, at UW, they've introduced dummy resources to prevent nVir from coming back. Hopefully its introduction was accidental and we'll have no more problems, if not we'll be forced to consider stronger action. For a good intro article on the viruses read this September's MacUser. A suggestion for developers. Design things so they run from a locked volume and with a locked system volume. UW is going to be buying a lot of stuff to put on public clusters and if this virus fad gets any worse this could become a major consideration when selecting software to support. I'm sure there are lots of other places with similar concerns. -ME