HAG2@vms.cis.pitt.edu (11/02/90)
In Digest V3 #177 someone mentioned that a virus could hide in the disk drive since it has RAM, ROM, etc... However, the RAM is cleared whenever the unit is turned off. Therefore, any virus would have to somehow store itself in the drive whenever the computer is used, which can't be done. However, as I mentioned before, someone running the GEOS operating system could probably get a GEOS-specific virus... Besides, considering the abundancy of Commodore hackers, I'd assume that if a virus was possible, it would have been written by now...
woody@chinacat.Unicom.COM (Woody Baker @ Eagle Signal) (11/08/90)
HAG2@vms.cis.pitt.edu writes: > In Digest V3 #177 someone mentioned that a virus could hide in the disk > drive since it has RAM, ROM, etc... However, the RAM is cleared whenever > the unit is turned off. Therefore, any virus would have to somehow store > itself in the drive whenever the computer is used, which can't be done. It can, and was done. The Commodore drives are intellegent. There are several buffers in ram, that can be freely written to. A knowlegeable Commodore hacker can do this quite easily, and very simply infect a program. There were several protection schemes based on this very thing. a program was downloaded into the drives ram. Rather easy to do with a disk read, and then a buffer transfer command. These routines then hooked one of the multitude of hooks into the system, and proceeded to veto copies etc. Way back in 1980, I was selling Commodore computers, and installing them. I may have some sample code hanging around somewhere, but I don't know where. I do have the source for the old 4040 roms, and have looked at it quite a bit in those days. Yes, it can be done. Cheers Woody > Besides, considering the abundancy of Commodore hackers, I'd assume that if > a virus was possible, it would have been written by now... When the commodore computers were really common, viruses were essentially unknown.