4 ms·
Little note: The Minix hard disk clone contains the text string "Copyright Autumnal Water Corp. 1991" which is consistent with a boot sector virus called "Autum
by msla 4y ago
Little note: The Minix hard disk clone contains the text string "Copyright Autumnal Water Corp. 1991" which is consistent with a boot sector virus called "Autumnal.3072" so... I don't know, don't run it in a virtual machine hooked up to any other disk images you care about? This is the first time I've ever found malware on retrocomputing media, and goddamn if I don't love the verisimilitude. Don't Copy That Floppy and such.
I found that with binwalk. Using strings, I found the string "Dis is one half." which is on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OneHalf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OneHalf
> OneHalf is a DOS-based polymorphic computer virus (hybrid boot and file infector) discovered in October 1994.[1] It is also known as Slovak Bomber, Freelove or Explosion-II.[2] It infects the master boot record (MBR) of the hard disk, and any files with extensions .COM, .SCR and .EXE.[3] However, it will not infect files that have SCAN, CLEAN, FINDVIRU, GUARD, NOD, VSAFE, MSAV or CHKDSK in the name.[4]
[snip]
> OneHalf is known for its peculiar payload: at every boot, it encrypts two unencrypted cylinders of the user's hard disk, but then temporarily decrypts them when they are accessed. This makes sure the user does not notice that their hard disk is being encrypted like this, and lets the encryption continue further. It also hides the real MBR from programs on the computer, to make detection harder. The encryption is done by bitwise XORing by a randomly generated key, which can be decrypted simply by XORing with the same bit stream again. Once the virus has encrypted half of the disk, and/or on the 4th, 8th, 10th, 14th, 18th, 20th, 24th, 28th and 30th of any month and under some other conditions, the virus will display the message:[4]
Dis is one half.
Press any key to continue ...
http://virus.wikidot.com/onehalf http://virus.wikidot.com/onehalf
So that's at least two different viruses. This thing is more infected than a streetwalker after Fleet Week.
- ZunarJ5 4y agoMalwarebytes blocked this site instantly. Don't dip in without protection.
- nubinetwork 4y ago> This is the first time I've ever found malware on retrocomputing media I have one of those windows 2000 n-in-1 discs that has some viruses embedded into it... it's the only one I can think of off-hand that wasn't actually back in the day. (Which reminds me, I should probably delete it)