sph0301@utsph.sph.uth.tmc.edu (Kate Wilson) (05/13/91)
After months of fighting the Stoned virus, we now have had at least one occurance of Joshi. There are a couple questions I have about this virus - First, the infected machine was checked (by me) using McAfee's Scan76 on Monday. On Tuesday the PC started having "real time clock errors". By Wednesday morning it wouldn't boot - hung up when it hit the first line of the config.sys file. After several hours of troubleshooting, we checked for viruses again, and this time Joshi showed up. The user swears she hadn't used ANY floppy disks in the last couple days (not even her own)...I don't known anything about this virus - what are the typical symptoms? Is there some time delay before it activates? Second question: according to VIRLIST.TXT included with the McAfee program, Joshi corrupts data files. Does this mean that it could reside in a data file, or just that it could damage them? I always thought that viruses only damaged executable files. If I had scanned the PC using SCAN /A (to scan all files, not just executables) might I have caught this sooner? Kate Wilson UT School of Public Health Houston, TX sph0301@utsph.sph.uth.tmc.edu