From: ab411@detroit.freenet.org (David R. Conrad)
Date: Thu, 10 Aug 95 08:01:10 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Dir.Byway Virus (NewsClip)
Message-ID: <199508101500.LAA20644@detroit.freenet.org>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain




turner@telecheck.com writes:
>Seems like a good-press piece for a small anti-viral software
>company.  Just one small pick to nit:

Actually, Dr. Sol's AVTK is consistently one of the very top DOS virus
scanners, in terms of percent of known viruses it catches.

>anonymous-remailer@shell.portal.com said:
>> Bitton said the company's "Dr. Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit" will 
>> remove the virus from infected computers. New versions of the Toolkit 
>> for DOS, Windows, OS/2, and NetWare are slated to ship in late 
>> summer. S&S also plans Fall 1995 introductions of Toolkits for 
>> Macintosh, SCO Unix, Windows 95, and Windows NT server and 
>> workstations.
>
>Windows NT has an abstracted and object oriented design.  User mode
>programs no longer have access to the hardware (ie., you no longer
>have access to the boot sector, and cannot hook an interrupt).  In
>short, viruses are much less likely to function under NT, yet these
>blood-sucking people can't wait to introduce software for it...

I can't speak for S&S, but I'd bet that what they are introducing is
a scanner for archives of MS-DOS programs hosted on NT systems.
Although it may be that NT-specific viruses have started appearing.
(The restrictions on file access don't slow the spread of file
infectors all that much -- it's enough for them to infect those things
they have write permission for.  I think the good Dr. Cohen has done
some research on this?)

In any case, this is more appropriate for comp.virus than cpunks.

--
David R. Conrad, ab411@detroit.freenet.org, http://web.grfn.org/~conrad/
Finger conrad@grfn.org for PGP 2.6 public key; it's also on my home page
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No, his mind is not for rent to any god or government.