Comments on: A virus on a computer… that must be Microsoft’s fault.

By: joel esler

joel esler — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 12:36:03 +0000

I was making fun of several things.
#1 that the virus got on there in the first place. (bullguard)
#2 microsoft’s overly convoluted naming structure. Home premium.

I dont think its microsofts fault at all. Its the manufacturer’s fault.

Really has nothing to do with vista. I only posted it because i thought it was funny. Other than that, you are right…. The post has no point.

By: kurt wismer

kurt wismer — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 22:08:15 +0000

my mistake, you’re right, joel was taking a shot at microsoft…

on reading the comments on the register article i found a bunch more people taking shots at microsoft while obviously oblivious to the nature of boot infectors…

as for a pre-existing infection, windows writes to the mbr during install – if angelina survived that it would imply that it’s stealth functionality (redirecting io to the relocated mbr) was still operational, which would require that the pre-install environment wasn’t in 32bit protected mode (which doesn’t sound right to me, having used PE disks in the past)…

By: Tyler Reguly

Tyler Reguly — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 21:42:05 +0000

I’d say that Joel was taking a shot at Microsoft over this… as was Bullguard.

As for the boot sector change detection…. There’s a good chance the virus existed prior to Vista (given that Vista doesn’t require a boot disk to install)

By: Dave Lewis

Dave Lewis — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 21:40:10 +0000

I agree. It’s odd that folks are going after Microsoft on this one. To be fair it really has zilch to do with them. I’m a Mac fan but, I gave up disparaging Microsoft some time ago. It’s tiresome.

The part of this story that struck me as amusing with the fact that this virus was loaded at all. This would seem to point to some interesting practices at Medion, the laptop company. Some antivirus vendors remove older signatures from their detection but, it still looks bad when it hits the press.

And yes, the sky is not falling.

By: kurt wismer

kurt wismer — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 21:39:34 +0000

i don’t really see anybody blaming microsoft over this, but i have seen the question raised about what happened to their boot sector change detection routines which existed in previous versions…