From: mcafee@netcom.com (McAfee Associates)
Subject: Re: "FORM" Virus
Followup-To: poster
Summary: Short description of FORM virus
Organization: McAfee Associates
Date: Sun, 22 Nov 1992 07:28:35 GMT

Hello Michael Tanglao,


In article <coiLuB1w165w@student.business.uwo.ca> m4tangla@student.business.uwo.ca (Michael Tanglao) writes:
>I am currently having problems getting rid of the "FORM" virus from our LAN 
>sys.  Does anyone know anything about this virus?  Norton Anti-Virus does not 
>seem to eliminate it, although F-prot does.  I am using F-prot on all the 
>stations, so I thought I had taken care of it.  Unfortunately, some bizarre 
>disk errors have occurred recently.
>
>Does anyone know anything about what this virus does?  Are there Norton virus 
>definitions available for it?

The FORM virus is a floppy disk and hard disk boot sector infector, that is,
it relocates the DOS Boot Sector to another location on the disk and copies
itself into the original location so the next time that disk is booted from
the virus is loaded into memory.  Once resident in memory, the virus monitors
the system for other disks to infect.  When a disk is accessed, the virus
checks to see if it is infected and if not, places a copy of itself onto the
disk.

The virus activates on the 18th or the 24th of the month, depending on which
variant you have.  At that time, the virus will make a click sound over the
speaker whenever a key is pressed on the keyboard.

The FORM virus is too large to fit into one sector, so it stores the original
boot sector along with the rest of its code at the end of infected disks (I
don't recall the exact location) in several sectors marked as bad.

The fastest way to remove the virus is to boot infected PC's from an original
DOS boot disk (the DOS Install disk that comes with most PC's is great).  
After booting, using the DOS "SYS" command to transfer a new boot sector from
the floppy diskette to the hard disk.  You can also use the SYS command to
remove the virus from any bootable floppies, or copy the files off the 
infected diskettes, reformat, and reload the programs to them.  After
removal, run CHKDSK to recover the bad clusters created by the virus and
delete them.

Alternatively, you may want to try using a different anti-viral program.
Several public domain and shareware anti-viral programs are available by
anonymous ftp from the WSMR-SIMTEL20.Army.Mil archives or any of its 
mirror sites (North American mirrors include wuarchive.wustl.edu and
oak.oakland.edu, if recall correctly).

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky
McAfee Associates Technical Support

>
>Please send all replies to lawphf@ccs.cc1.uwo.ca.
>Thanks.
>
>m4tangla@student.business.uwo.ca (Michael Tanglao)
>Western Business School  --  London, Ontario


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