Damn...... I am old.....<sigh>

My first and most interesting experience with a virus was good old Stoned about 12 years ago. The receptionist's computer was infected with it. Back then NCR used a slightly different sector size then other computer manufacturers so going out and buying Norton proved to be a bit if a waste of cash. I ended up having to call Norton to get an idea of exactly how the virus worked to determine how to get rid of it. Turns out to really be reather simple. The virus would take sector zero and write it to the first unused sector which was sector 7 and write itself into sector zero thus executing itself at boot and executing a jump to sector 7 when it was done. There was a hard jump from sector zero to sector 1 at the end of sector 1 anyway so the boot sector did not need to be changed. The problem with Norton was that rather then execute a jump to sector 7 via the FAT it would count a literal number to find the beginning of sector 7 and that's where it would fall down on an NCR drive - the sectors were a different size. All I had to do to repair it was copy sector 7 back over sector zero and bingo - all was well.

The real funny part was that this peeked my interest..... I wanted to know where it had come from. Not many people in the office were literate and those that were were all creatures of habit. So I scanned every floppy in the office, (200 plus), and found no sign of infection. Funny, thinks me...... So I go to the network fileservers that provided the programs to our micrographics machines and that had just been upgraded to Novell 2.11, (wow). Lo and behold they were both infected...... Upon asking the receptionist if her un-networked computer had been used by the upgrade techs from corporate she said they had - OK - I have the infection source.......

I write all my findings down and send them off to corporate in sunny California only to called into my bosses office a few days later and utterly reamed for accusing them of spreading a virus across the breadth of the country. He, via them, informed me that these peeps "really new their $h1t and could never make such an amateur mistake"....... That was followed by a nasty memo from the corporate head tech chap telling me the same thing...... Boy, was I pi$$ed.....

I found out the tech's schedule for upgrades and started calling the offices he had visited prior to mine.... 5 of them..... Funny old thing, all five offices servers were infected with Stoned.... I was LMAO now..... I called the office he was currently at and asked the local tech there to insist that the corp. tech scan his install disks for viruses before he carries out the upgrade. Apparently after a lot of indignant BS he went ahead and scanned them..... They _all_ were infected with Stoned...... Duh....

I never heard from Corporate again...... They never apologized and they never sent people to do further upgrades etc. they would just send me the stuff...... Two months later I was promoted to District Systems Specialist responsible for New York, Philly, Delaware, Rhode Island and all points in between.......

And that's how I learned about viruses and corporate BS........