It originally activated on any machine with a color monitor from September to December in the years 1980 and 1988. Michelangelo The Michelangelo virus, also referred to by some virus watchers as Stoned. Since then, a number of strains have come about, and is now also known by a variety of names. On the said trigger date, it destroys files by overwriting critical areas of the hard disk or floppy disk with garbage, rendering the rest of the disk, and information on it, useless. Once a bootable disk is infected with this virus is ceases to be so.
Infections are the result of system boot-ups using infected diskettes.
On Mondays, a counter counts down from 240 each time a file is infected. When zero is reached, a low level format of the hard disk is performed. Written by a Malaysian student. Copyright 1989-2001 Trend Micro Incorporated. All rights reserved.