Dirwaste | |
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Type | Boot sector virus |
Creator | |
Date Discovered | |
Place of Origin | |
Source Language | |
Platform | Atari ST |
Reported Costs |
Dirwaste also known as the Directory Waster Virus, is a boot sector virus for the Atari ST. It was discovered by Michael Schussler, though its date of discovery has been lost.
When a disk infected with Dirwaste is booted, it becomes memory resident and hooks vectors Hdv_bpb and resvector, giving it access to disks and keeping itself in memory after a warm reset. It copies itself to drives A and B as they are accessed. Disks cannot be immunized agains the virus. It does not try to infect the hard drive. When first becoming memory resident, it hooks the standard reset vector in a standard way, but after the computer is reset, it bends the hdv_bpb vector and becomes reset-resistant in an undocumented way.
After every 20th copy of the virus is made, it destroys the first 20 tracks on both side 0 and of the current disk.
Richard Karsmakers. THE KNOWN VIRUSES ON ATARI TOS COMPUTERS AND THEIR SYMPTOMS.