padgett%tccslr.dnet@uvs1.orl.mmc.com (A. Padgett Peterson) (02/27/91)
More and more we are seeing reports of institutions being hit by the STONED and other BSI viruses. Unless there is a trojan involved, the only way for a machine to become infected by one of these is by booting from a floppy. What amazes me is that boot records contain no integrity checking whatsoever (this includes the DOS 5.00 beta we are testing) particularly since the code would take only a few bytes. Following with the DISKSECURE experiment, I wrote a Boot Record program that just replaces the executable on a non-booting disk with such a check procedure. If all goes well, it tells you. If the disk has become infected, it also tells you, not what has infected the disk, but that something has. In the future, I expect large organizations to remove FORMAT and SYS from most machines and either use a central formatting facility or purchase preformatted disks. Putting a new boot record on a disk takes 2-3 seconds. Since the difficulty of putting such checks into disk approaches zero. My feeling is that use of such disks should be one of the layers of protection for the "safe" PC model. Padgett Would you trust ANY computer in Kuwait today ?