[comp.virus] Virus attack AMIGA

armhold@topaz.rutgers.edu (George Armhold) (12/02/89)

The other day someone brought the Byte Bandit virus into our lab.  A
user came in to print from the Amiga using Scribble!.  He booted from
his Workbench and proceeded to have several problems printing to the
Apple Imagewriter II.  After he left I re-booted with my Workbench
which runs VirusX3.20 as part of its startup-sequence.  To my surprise
VirusX reported that the Byte Bandit virus was in memory, and had
infected the disk in df2:!  Removing the virus with VirusX was simple
enough.

My question is, could this virus (Byte Bandit) have been responsible
for the problems we had printing?  We had the right printer driver,
and the preferences settings all seemed OK but it just would not print
properly.  It changed type style randomly, stopped printing half way
through a job, and wouldn't abide to margin settings.  I've never had
this type of problem before with Scribble!, which leads me to believe
that the virus might have had something to do with it. I know that
virii on the Mac tend to affect printing.  Has anyone else experienced
this situation?

- -George

rwallace@vax1.tcd.ie (12/05/89)

armhold@topaz.rutgers.edu (George Armhold) writes:
> My question is, could this virus (Byte Bandit) have been responsible
> for the problems we had printing?  We had the right printer driver,
> and the preferences settings all seemed OK but it just would not print
> properly.  It changed type style randomly, stopped printing half way
> through a job, and wouldn't abide to margin settings.  I've never had
> this type of problem before with Scribble!, which leads me to believe
> that the virus might have had something to do with it. I know that
> virii on the Mac tend to affect printing.  Has anyone else experienced
> this situation?

I've never heard of Byte Bandit affecting printing, but you generally
can't predict what a virus will do on someone else's system. There are
too many variables and virus code is generally too badly written. The
only answer is, if the problems show up with the virus in memory and
not without it then the virus caused them.

"To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem"
Russell Wallace, Trinity College, Dublin
VMS:  rwallace@vax1.tcd.ie
UNIX: rwallace@unix1.tcd.ie