[comp.virus] In the past year...

CHESS@YKTVMV.BITNET (David.M.Chess) (05/30/91)

Below is a list, in roughly descending order, of the PC-DOS viruses
that we've actually seen in real-life incidents in the past year (to
eliminate "one-off"s, and try to get just the important ones, I've
only listed the ones that we've seen and verified in at least three
incidents over the past year; this technique of data-reduction is open
to modification!).

I'd be very interested in similar lists from other folks, especially
if there are significant differences.  The population that we see
reports from, as we've said before, is heavily weighted towards
Fortune-500 companies and suchlike, but has some of everything.  I've
only counted incidents in which we were able to get a sample and
verify (by hand, or with a CRC-based automatic verifier) that it
really was that virus; I'm not counting "I've heard that Wuga is
widespread in the Arctic" or "my cousin ran a virus-scanner, and it
said he had the GaBooo virus, so he formatted his hard disk" sorts of
reports.  (I'd appreciate it if other folks who are kind enough to
make their lists available would indicate whether they're using
similar standards for what to count.)

Here are ours.  28 different viruses (I've folded together the 1813
and one tiny variant of it, that we call 1813-00).  Note that the
slope is very steep here; the Bouncing Ball accounts for fewer than
one-third as many incidents as the 1813.

   Stoned (Marijuana)
   1813 (Jerusalem)
   Bouncing Ball (Ping-Pong)
   JOSHI
   Yankee Doodle-2885 (TP44VIR)
   1701
   4096 (Frodo)
   1704
   Sunday
   Dark Avenger
   Vacsina (TP05VIR)
   TP16VIR
   Slow
   Form
   Brain
   Keypress
   Flip-2153
   Plastique (Anti-CAD)
   Disk Killer
   1575
   Microbe
   Liberty
   Yankee Doodle-2772 (TP39VIR)
   5120 (VBASIC)
   Ohio
   Anarkia
   1381 (Internal Error)

Is everyone else seeing similar things?

DC

c-rossgr@uunet.uu.net (05/31/91)

>From:    "David.M.Chess" <CHESS@YKTVMV.BITNET>

Microcom tech support in Virex-PC reports:

1.  Stoned
2.  Jerusalem (with varients)
3.  Disk Killer/Ogre  (yeah, surprised me, too!)
4.  Joshi
5-10.  Cascade, Fumanchu, Sunday (yeah...see 2., above), Yankee (and varients)
       Ping Pong, Ghostballs.

My own tech support for FLU_SHOT+ shows:

1.  Jerusalem (with varients)
2.  Stoned
3.  Joshi
4.  Ping Pong
5.  everything else.

Ross