Michelangelo (Computervirus)
The Michelangelo virus is a computer virus that was first discovered in April 1991 in New Zealand.
The virus should DOS systems infected ( but it does not handle the operating system or resulted from internal commands; Michelangelo acted largely as all boot sector viruses at the BIOS level ) and slept until 6 March, the birthday of the Renaissance artist Michelangelo. There is no reference to the artist within the virus and it is doubtful that the author wanted to establish a link between the virus and Michelangelo. A more likely scenario is that the virus was an attack against the at that time better known " Friday the 13th " ( Friday the 13th ) virus. Since this attack exactly a week ago Friday, March 13, 1992 was, computer users would have been affected, who believed in front of the Jerusalem virus to be able, by changing the system date on 12 March protect. Michelangelo is a variant of the Stoned virus.
Should it be at the PC to an AT or PS / 2, the virus overwrites on March 6, the first 100 sectors of the hard disk with zeros. The virus starts from a geometry of 256 cylinders, 4 heads and 17 sectors per track. Although all user data are still present on the hard drive, they would be found and lost for the average user.
In hard disks, the virus moves the original master boot record to cylinder 0, head 0, sector 7
On floppy disks, if its capacity is 360 kB, the original boot sector to cylinder 0, head 1, sector 3 is moved.
On other disks, the virus moves the original boot sector to cylinder 0, head 1, sector 14
- This is the last directory of a 1.2 MB floppy disk.
- This is the penultimate directory of a 1.44 MB floppy disk.
Although the virus should infect DOS systems, it can also easily get other operating systems be damaged, as it, like many other viruses also infected the Master Boot Record of a hard drive. After a system is infected, each disk is accessed by the system immediately infected (1992 was still check no way to know if a medium is in the drive, so that infection was not possible until when access to the drive took place). Since the virus dormant spent most of the time and was active only on March 6, it is quite possible that an infection for years remained undetected - as long as it was not booted on the corresponding date.
The virus gained great international attention when it turned out that some computers and software manufacturers, the virus had accidentally shipped with their products in January 1992 (eg the LANSpool print server from Intel). Although thereof only a few hundred units were affected, it was claimed by "experts" in the public soon, thousands or even millions of computers could be infected with Michelangelo. On March 6, 1992, in any case reports of only 10,000 to 20,000 cases of data loss. The news lost interest and the virus was quickly forgotten. Despite the above-described scenarios that a system remains infected unnoticed for years, until 1997, no cases were known. Meanwhile vulnerable systems are unlikely to have operated.