frisk@rhi.hi.is (Fridrik Skulason) (09/13/89)
It was interesting to see the numbers by John McAfee, regarding the
frequency of various PC viruses in the US. Just to illustrate how
different things are elsewhere, here is an estimate of the situation
here in Iceland.
1701/1704 60 %
Ping-Pong 30 %
Icelandic 5 %
Brain 5 %
No other virus has so far been detected here in Iceland, which quite
surprising, since some viruses that are very common elsewhere,
Jerusalem and Stoned in particular, should have arrived here by now.
The major reason the 1701/1704 number is so high is that some large
companies have been infected. They include the University of Iceland,
the Post & Telephone company and two major computer companies here.
In one case there was a company-wide infection, and a good reason for
that. It seems that somebody in management had decided that only a
handful of men should have permission to install new software. This
was done for a number of reasons, one of them to minimize the
likelihood of virus infections.
What happened was that one person in this group got infected, and
within two weeks he had spread the infection all over the company -
You see, they were upgrading from DOS 3.2 to 3.3, and he was
resposible for distributing the master copies to every department. On
every disk was a copy of the Icelandic keyboard program - a program
that was executed in AUTOEXEC.BAT. And - this program was infected
with 1704.
The past week the entire PC support department there has been working
overtime cleaning up their mess and running disinfection programs.