Anti- Virus For ste mega tos 2.06

[Starlight]

Hi

yesterday when my atari was booting it gave me a message that somethink was changed and it may be a virus

where can i find an antivirus soft. for my atari?

[Christos]

Virus??? Wow, I had contracted one too! About ten years ago. It was a real bugger too! You had to double click on it so that it could be installed.

Anyway basically what were the symptoms? What did the Atari do? My guess would be that it was one of those "virus free bootsectors" and since I' ve never ever heard of anyone's ST with a viral infection it's probably nothing.

[+Stephen Moss]

You can download UVK 2000 from http://www.uvk2000.com/ for free although there is a PAyPal button to make a donation. Although it has not been updated for a while UVK is probably the best virus killer for the Atari, I got my copy back when you actually had to pay for it.

[walter_J64bit]

What really? Viruses on the ST, I thought it was just a MSdos/MS Windows PC thing.

[+save2600]

What really? Viruses on the ST, I thought it was just a MSdos/MS Windows PC thing.

 

Haha, nah - viruses were a real thing, even for the Amiga, C64, Apple, etc. Mostly distributed/contracted among the pirate community. There were even some commercial anti-virus programs on store shelves you could purchase BITD. Don't believe I ever contracted one - but have heard how they'd destroy data on your floppies, hard drive and/or play other tricks on your system. Can reek havoc if contracted, especially after performing a warm-boot on systems such as the Amiga.

[simonsunnyboy]

Virus??? Wow, I had contracted one too! About ten years ago. It was a real bugger too! You had to double click on it so that it could be installed.

Anyway basically what were the symptoms? What did the Atari do? My guess would be that it was one of those "virus free bootsectors" and since I' ve never ever heard of anyone's ST with a viral infection it's probably nothing.

Well, i somehow had the notorious Ghost virus on my disk collection in the 90s. Nasty one which inverted the mouse after a few resets or so.

I didn't find anything more serious but there are virii on the ST and it is a good idea to check for them with uvk2000.

 

Many "Virus free bootsectors" are actually not only passive but monitor some system vectors. Not that bad and much more efficient than modern PC anti virus tools.

[ParanoidLittleMan]

...

Many "Virus free bootsectors" are actually not only passive but monitor some system vectors. Not that bad and much more efficient than modern PC anti virus tools.

You can not compare two things. Now must monitor 1000x more things than some system vectors. There is more Windows, browser virus than count of all SW ever made for Atari.

And some anti-virus SW made more damage than virus cleaning - destroying of bootsectors of games for instance. It is bootable (checksum= $1234, there is soemething what looks like code - kill it ! Far from efficient.

[simonsunnyboy]

I agree there but I personally only used the warning ones sofar which simply refuse to continue to boot. That is acceptable.

Edited January 30, 2015 by simonsunnyboy

[Zogging Hell]

I think I actually have disk images of the Ghost and Green Goblin viruses on infected disks (and on original disk). For some reason I thought I better keep them as no-one else probably will..

 

So if someone fancies ruining all their original ST games at some point...

[Lynxpro]

 

Haha, nah - viruses were a real thing, even for the Amiga, C64, Apple, etc. Mostly distributed/contracted among the pirate community. There were even some commercial anti-virus programs on store shelves you could purchase BITD. Don't believe I ever contracted one - but have heard how they'd destroy data on your floppies, hard drive and/or play other tricks on your system. Can reek havoc if contracted, especially after performing a warm-boot on systems such as the Amiga.

 

I remember many different stories about viruses on the Amiga due to Kickstart discs and that you didn't see viruses on the ST until the later TOS releases.

[sh3-rg]

Besides the usual bootsector viruses, I had a link virus on the ST, It came bolted on to some version of ProTracker I got from a contact in Finland. AFAIR it didn't do anything more harmful than spread itself around.