Kobold
Kobold
Type Boot sector virus
Creator
Date Discovered 1989.01.02
Place of Origin Germany?
Source Language
Platform Atari ST
Infection Length 1 boot sector
Reported Costs

Kobold is an Atari ST boot sector virus. It appeared first in 1989 and appears to come from Germany. Like many Atari ST viruses, much information about it seems to have been lost and there are not many systems available for testing. This would not matter very much, as the virus was notoriously difficult to analyze, with at least one analyst wishing painful death on the coder.

The virus goes memory resident when an infected disk is booted, hooking Hdv_bpb and resvector. It appears only able to infect disks in drive A: and only infects after a second reset after being installed. Obviously, it stays resident for most system resets. There are reports of the virus formatting hard disks, though this is not confirmed. It will display the text KOBOLD#2 AKTIV!".

The virus originates either in Germany or in some other German-speaking country. It has been seen as far as Yugoslavia, but it is uncertain if the virus ever made it out of Europe. The word "Kobold" is German for Leprechaun. It is unknown if a Kobold#1 exists in the wild.

Sources

Hallvard Tangeraas. Common viri (sic) on the Atari ST. 1996.02.15

Richard Karsmakers. THE KNOWN VIRUSES ON ATARI TOS COMPUTERS AND THEIR SYMPTOMS.

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