MSX Virus

Prophet (2266)

17-09-2003, 17:05

There were any MSX virus? And antivirus? Do you know the actions of one or another msx virus? Do you have any copy of this virus? (As a collection of something).

By DarQ

Paragon (1038)

17-09-2003, 17:24

i only once encountered a dumb "virus" that did something to as much .COM files as it could. IT would then display something about a birdthday at a certain date.... but that's the ONLY MSX vs VIRUS relation i've ever heard of..

By Arjan

Paladin (787)

17-09-2003, 17:34

yeah it's called the zapp virus (or something like that), and it would display 'today's zapp's birthday'. The damn thing slowed down execution of a COM file a lot, since it tried to infect other com files too. It could also infect COMMAND.COM, which sucks because after infecting that file MSXDOS couldn't be loaded anymore (IIRC)

By cax

Prophet (3741)

17-09-2003, 17:58

I remember this virus.

It takes less than 0x100 bytes in free part of boot sector, and on 25/12 it says "Happy birthday, Natasha". Well, it's my own birthday too

At Summer Programmers' School in 1988 near Novosibirsk, I was told it's invented by one of our MSX teachers in that school. I even had it's ASM source with explanations.

Floppies were rare these days (I got my first floppy in 1990), and even tapes costs were high, so my friend from Blagoveshchensk sent me the printed hex dump of the virus in a letter. I used disk editor to put the hex dump directly into the sector 0.

Later I studied the code and changed it so it stopped DOS booting on Wednesdays only, when our class had computer lessons at school. In this form the virus was spread all over Yuzhno-Sakhalinks and the whole Sakhalin island.

I remember the day when teachers from many schools in the town called me (I worked in Teacher's Training institute and was freed from attending computer classes at school) and asked to give them working copy of MSX-DOS, because all of their system disks were corrupted.

I also was forced to distribute for free my own program that loads and sends files via Yamaha MSX2 network, so I modified it to erase itself on some random day... but it's already another story.

By BiFi

Enlighted (4348)

17-09-2003, 18:22

Do you still have that source by any chance? (no I don't want to make a new virus, but it would be quite interresting to see how it was done).

By anonymous

incognito ergo sum (116)

17-09-2003, 19:16

IIRC, there were 2 anti-virus programs for the Zapp virus. One is TCAV (Techno Crew's Anti Virus) and the other I can't remember.
Zapp is quite annoying. I know just last year a spanish MSX user was infected with it, even though it's almost 10 years old!
Keeping infected COMs in LZH/PMA archive and then distributing wil do that to ya