DMOYNIHA@WAYNEST1.BITNET (Dennis P. Moynihan) (07/25/89)
Way back in April the following was reported to this list: >Date: Thu, 27-Apr-89 13:57:27 PDT >From: portal!cup.portal.com!Alan_J_Roberts@Sun.COM >Subject: Missouri Virus (PC) > >The Homebase group has logged over a dozen occurrences of this virus >but we have never successfully sampled it. The latest occurrence was >notable enough to pass on to Virus-L so that we might get some >assistance. The occurance was at the National Security >Administration. The virus came into their shop on a disk shipped with >the book - "DOS Power Tools", published by Bantam. This was the third >report of the virus entering an installation on this book. The virus >completely disables writing to the hard disk, but it does allow normal >reading of data already stored. Every site that has been hit has >destroyed or lost the original source disk, and the target disk. The >NSA is no exception. Robert Dimsdale of the NSA in Fort Meade >originally reported the virus to the CVIA and he cut the floppy into 8 >sections prior to calling. He then disrarded the standard CVIA advice >and low level formatted the hard disk. Anyone with any additional >information about this virus is invited to share that information with >what we already know by contacting the HomeBase board. We know that >Missouri is a virus and not a Trojan because we have documented four >occurances of its replication. Please do not contact Mr. Dimsdale >directly. Serious inquiries should be addressed through Jim Corwell >on Homebase. He will pass on your name to the NSA and they will >reply. > .... This just became a bit of a hot topic here today. We noted the report in our newsletter and have been receiving calls about it. Most have been from users who have "Dos power tools" and want to know if their machine will roll over any time soon. One, interestingly, was from Bantam. They wanted to know where we got this from. Anyway, have there been any more reports regarding this virus? I got the impression from the above that if a copy of "Dos power tools" had the virus people found out quick. Any other news in general on this? - -------------------------------------- Dennis Moynihan (DMOYNIHA@WAYNEST1) Computing and Information Technology Wayne State University Detroit, MI