[comp.virus] a long time ago

woody@chinacat.Unicom.COM (Woody Baker @ Eagle Signal) (09/19/90)

About a year and a half ago, one of the guys at work had been playing
Lesiure Suit Larry a lot.  One day, he mistyped the date, to somthing
like the next year, and up popped a colored picture of a computer with
a jagged break down the middle.  We never did find what it was, but
did suspect a virus.  We have not been able to find it since.  Has
anyone ever seen this before?

Secondarily, it seems to me that there is a class of viruses that we
fortunatly have not seen yet.  Application specific viruses.  Consider
a virus written by someone who is POed at LOTUS for thier recent court
victory (really a sad chapter in computer history).  This virus would
infect and spread, but only corrupt a program that had a lotus
copyright on it.  I seem to remember a note about a bulgarian virus
that looked for an anti viral product and trashed it.  Has anyone
encountered a virus that exhibits the above behaviors?

Cheers
Woody

tarquin@athena.mit.edu (Robert P Poole) (09/23/90)

>About a year and a half ago, one of the guys at work had been playing
>Lesiure Suit Larry a lot.  One day, he mistyped the date, to somthing
>like the next year, and up popped a colored picture of a computer with
>a jagged break down the middle.  We never did find what it was, but
>did suspect a virus.  We have not been able to find it since.  Has
>anyone ever seen this before?

Sierra On Line, the producers of Leisure Suit Larry, have been warning
people for a while now that there are pirated copies of LSL floating
around which are infected with a virus.  A banking firm in England had
a copy of the infected game on their system, and one day it wiped out
their entire database (I kid you not).  Moral of the story is:

(a) don't play games on corporate computers

(b) don't screw around with pirated copies of certain software.
- --
Robert P. Poole                       tarquin@athena.mit.edu
46 Massachusetts Avenue               MIT Course VIII
311B Bexley Hall                      "We make Idols of our concepts, but
Cambridge, MA  02139                   wisdom is born of wonder."