A batch of laptops pre-installed with Windows Vista Home Premium was found to have been infected with a 13-year-old boot sector virus.
Those of you with a long memory will vividly recall the year 1994: Nirvana’s lead singer Kurt Cobain died, South Africa held its first multi-racial elections, and Tony Blair became leader of the Labour party. Oh, and Microsoft’s operating system was the quaint, pre-NT Windows for Workgroups.
But it was a year that also saw the arrival of a boot sector computer virus known as Stoned.Angelina which moved the original master boot record to cylinder 0, head 0, sector 9.
The computers had been loaded with Microsoft’s latest operating system Vista and Bullguard’s anti-virus software, which failed to detect and remove the malware.
Innovation, security – keep those slogans rolling!
Good gravy. Another reason NOT to use Vista.
bwa ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
yo microsoft apologists — where is your god now?!?!?!?!
Thats Old School. Those were good times. CMOS corrupters, remembed the 12 tricks trojan? Partition scribblers. I have a test CD with over 3000 of those old school viruses, sometimes, when I get a flaky HD I am pissed at, I feed it a virus to put it out of its misery.
Bullguard?
Seems to me that it was as big a problem as the virii it purported to protect against….
Regards,
Stu.
LOL!!! Wow, yea safest Microsoft operating system yet my ass.
And here come the Apple fanboys in droves. It’s widely known that Vista is a much more secure OS than OSX….exactly how many stories have there been about Vista vulnerabilities until now?
Exactly.
Grow up, fanboys. Your god jobs doesn’t care about security, its just that your little niche of a market is too small to write viruses for.
Preemptive strike, Axtell? (Do you have to meet a quota?)
Vista has not been out long enough for people to find the vulnerabilities, that’s all. All those back doors MS put into the OS so they can control our computers? Someone is going to figure out where they are, sooner or later.
This actually has nothing to do with Vista or Windows at all. It’s a boot sector virus. I imagine they used a infected floppy disk to install some drivers before they installed Windows on the system.
“Grow up, fanboys. Your god jobs doesn’t care about security, its just that your little niche of a market is too small to write viruses for.”
You know, the last time I checked, Mac OS X had more market share than Windows Vista. How’s that foot taste? That’s right, by your theory, no one would bother writing malware for Vista, as no one is using it.
You’re probably correct #9. Certainly, M$oft helps out their bubbas at HP – who are still using pre-DOS drivers from Wang on some of their “advanced” printers.
#6 – Now that you’ve been owned by #10, please kill yourself. Thank you.
Bear in mind people, Vista is…
Windows Server 2005
Reintroduces true MS-DOS
Is flashy
Did not make initial deadlines
Kludged together to get out on the market ASAP…
…After modeling it on XP was scrapped…
…Which made it late to begin with.
Now, if you want to bitch at my friend who told me it was based on WS 05, send me an E-Mail and your AIM screen name. Bear in mind he also uses Linux Ubuntu, and loves that more than Vista, but states Vista is MS’s best effort by far.
And you may wonder WHY, I dont like Windows AV??
Or Norton
Or MaAfee..
>>You know, the last time I checked, Mac OS X had more market
>>share than Windows Vista.
I wonder if anybody at all has actually willingly BOUGHT Vista. Every single person I know who’s using it had it stuffed down their throat when they bought a new computer (myself included).
On the other hand, many people (myself included) happily (almost) go out and BUY upgrades to OS X.
yeah this made me laugh sooooo hard when i read about it this morning
!! lol !!
Can a boot sector virus infect a *nix or *BSD HDD?
Makes a lot of sense to pre-infect your new Vista Laptop. I saves a lot of time waiting for it to catch a 13 year old virus. And maybe Vista has some kind of infant immunity thing, so you have to give it a weakened form of a PC virus to jumpstart it. Or…. maybe M$ is simply guilty of using the 13 year old software and computers, to program the next generation of safer PCes. And that’s where the virus krept in from. Dusty old puters and 5 1/4″ floppy disks! That should be a very humbling thought.
http://www.grc.com/securitynow.htm
Number 9 (“Number 9 , Number 9, Number 9 …”) nails it.
Could just have easily infected any Linux system. (Yawn),
another DU non-story posted by one of his agenda-burdened
minions.
Wow, I will make sure to virus scan any of my floppy disks before I boot from them… Also make sure you don’t have any floppy disks in your disk drive when you boot.
Also… the highly technical tool of fdisk /mbr is required to fix this non payload carrying virus that is unable to replicate in this age without floppy disks(the virus is unable to attack boot usb devices). Not that the facts will stop the Apple faithful from spouting their inane hyperbole….
Also, as per usual, the register story was wrong, the virus detector was able to detect it.
Does think differently mean more clueless and uninformed than ever?
OH also… http://tinyurl.com/268s3f
Ouch crushing defeat… yet again.
Yawn.
#12-
Owned? hah. Hardly.
Despite apple’s best efforts (and the efforts of their annoying fanboys) MS still continues to dominate.
Why can that be, if apple hardware and software are superior? Could it be that they aren’t?
Oh well, enjoy your blissful ignorance!
@17: Yes – it attacks the hardware, not the software. As such, no OS is safe.
@1,2,5,10,12: It has nothing to do with Vista, and equally targets OSX, Linux, Solaris, Symbian or any other OS that might conceivably be booted from a hard drive.
So the question to you is: do you want to call this a Vista virus? Then congratulations, we also have an exampel of those OSX viruses that are not supposed to exist.
#21 – Crushing defeat? Even Paul Thurrott stated, “In short, this article is all over the place, and doesn’t really hit on the reality of what’s happening here at all.” There’s your crushing defeat. The very captain of your cheerleading team, setting the record straight.
#23 – You’re speaking from your rear. EFI replaces MBR based booting. Effectively, Intel Macs, which use EFI, would not be susceptible to an MBR virus. Idiot.
If this virus can’t spread, then how did it end up on these Vista machines? I would have to imaging that most Vista machines wouldn’t even be equipped with a floppy drive.
@24: Macs, no. OSX, yes.
See, that’s the key difference. Again, it is a virus that attacks the hardware, not the software. It doesn’t matter what OS you’re using. As such, it is just as much an “OSX virus” as it is a “Vista virus” (i.e. not at all).
Wow, are those viruses still around?