And, like any other form of inoculation, it's only effective as a preventive measure, not as a treatment. Until recently, the Mac OS has been largely free of new Mac-specific viruses. To my knowledge, since 1994 there have been only four other real Mac-specific virus threats. However . . . enter the Autostart 9805 virus. AutoStart 9805 isn't actually a virus, but a worm.
Worms are self-contained programs that replicate themselves rather than infecting other programs.
The AutoStart 9805 worm started emerging in the Hong Kong region, and spread quickly throughout the world. It is intentionally destructive, overwriting certain files with random data. This damage is not repairable, so the files must be reinstalled or restored from a backup. That aside, the AutoStart 9805 can affect any Power Macintosh system. The Autostart worm may affect the computer in a way that would look like a hard disk or logic board failure.