ferguson@a1.relay.upenn.edu (Caroline Ferguson) (08/16/90)
Hello, Recently we have seen a case of a Windows PIF file infected by a virus (the 4096 to be exact). This seems to go against what I had been told about viruses (that they infect excuatables, boot sectors, the FAT and the partition table of hard disks.) The PIF file does not meet any of the above conditions so how is the PIF infected by the virus and, more importantly, how does the infected PIF file infect other files (I don't see how the PIF lets the virus "go resident"). I notice that SCAN 66, and some other packages, can be made to check all files so that an infection of this type should be easy to catch but I would really like to know the mechanism of infection. Thanks for any and all information you can give me! Caroline Ferguson University of Pennsylvania e-mail: Ferguson@a1.relay.upenn.edu@in (I think!)