[comp.virus] VSHIELD and Warm Boots

mcafee@netcom.com (McAfee Associates) (06/21/91)

padgett%tccslr.dnet@mmc.com (A. Padgett Peterson) writes:

(a lot of stuff deleted here...)
>I believe that VSHIELD protects from hot-boots now - do not believe
>that prevention from cold boots can be done without hardware or
>special BIOS.  My next project now that DISKSECURE is essentially
>complete will be a small addition to warn the user on boot if a floppy
>is in the drive - should not be difficult or require much code (trap
>cntrl-alt-del, check for floppy, write warning message, loop for
>response), several viruses make use of this technique already so it
>cannot be too difficult (famous last words).

VSHIELD traps warm (hot) boots (aka Ctrl-Alt-Dels, Three Finger
Salutes) to check the floppy drive and then the hard disk for boot
sector and partition table infecting viruses.  If a virus is found,
VSHIELD displays it's "found virus X in area Y" message and prompts
the user to power down and boot off a clean system disk.  If no virus
is found, then VSHIELD reboots the system as normal.

Some XT systems apparently have problems with this, causing a reboot
to take a long time (5 minutes or more).  If so, the option can be
turned off by using the /NB (No Boot) checking.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky
McAfee Associates Technical Support

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