On 19 Feb 00 at 18:20, Gregory J. Feig wrote:
>>Mark......all my CMOS Bios' are later than 1990....they all have
>>an Anti-virus toggle in the Setup utility....
>>
>>Since you CMOS Bios does not include it....the only recourse is for
>>you to do what you are doing.....run some kind of loadable anti-virus
>>.....and check every executable you download/install before you run
>>them.....
>>The CMOS Bios anti-virus only keeps a watch on my Master Boot Record
>>and other crucial hardware-level HDD areas....it will not detect a
>>virus infecting only executables, that doesn't try to mess with the
>>HDD structure itself....I use it as a bare minimum running-block
>>and I regularly run my other, loadable, AV utilities....
>>
>>DOS gives us some additional protection from the esoteric bugs now
>>running in macros, email, etc...since our Arachnes will not just
>>blindly go ahead an do something without us first telling it to
>>....and, or course, I don't run many Win or even OS/2 applications
>>which can be infected and launched into malicious activities.
I would like to recommend an anti-virus program I found recently,
UKVV. In addition to running from the command line, it runs
interactively and has a AV TSR (killerm.exe) that monitors your
system for irregular activity. For instance, I use a shareware delete
utility that modifies itself each time it is run to keep track of
it's trial period and when killerm.exe is loaded it pops up a warning
box that this program is being changed and offers a choice to allow
or stop this activity. Also, when Arachne attempts to load the packet
driver, it pops up another warning that a program is attempting to
become a TSR and offers a choice to allow or not allow this. I have
not tried it with a program that writes to the MBR so I cannot
testify that it detects this also. The TSR is about 4k and it will
load high and can be unloaded (depending of course whether anything
has been loaded high afterward) from the command line. The package is
a bit dated (Oct 1998), but I have been in email contact with the
author and he has promised to send a virus update for it, though I
have not received it yet. You can find the program by doing a search
for UKVV on any of the search engines as it is widely available on
all of the SIMTEL mirror sites. BTW, the whole program will fit on a
360K floppy so it is a good choice for older XT machines without
higher capacity drives.
Regards,
Dale Mentzer
Chaos, panic and disorder...my work here is done.
This mail written by a user of Arachne, the DOS Internet Client
WWWWW World Wide Web Without Windows
http://home.arachne.cz Arachne DOS Browser Home Page
