Biggest to my Commodore would be
Joseph Fenn
would be if Gates and his gang would give me a laptop with
entire os WIN95 and DOS6.22 in ROM chips. I say again R O M
memory chips so no virus nor beast of any kind could wreck my OS.
Joe (aka kilroy)
****************************************************
* Ham KH6JF AARS/MARS ABM6JF QCWA WW2 VET WD RADIO *
****************************************************
Larry Anderson
code would still have access to your programs and data.
What made the 64 and other older 8-bits so immune was that:
a) there was only an itsy bit of memory - not enough for a lame virus
much less any with sophistication (the only known Commodore 64 virus,
took something like 6k, which is a VERY noticible chunk of RAM).
b) given the commercial software's refusal to return use of the 64 to
the user prompting a "power-off reset" did wonders for preventing
viruses from moving from program to progam (again the known 64 virus
required BASIC and that you had to have the 64 not be reset from program
to program).
So even if you had a ROM OS laptop, you sill will have scads of RAM for
good and potentially bad programs to live in, and it will be accessing
other disks as well as the internet. So viruses could have a potential foothold.
Larry
--
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Larry Anderson - Sysop of Silicon Realms BBS (209) 754-1363
300-14.4k bps
Set your 8-bit C= rigs to sail for http://www.portcommodore.com/
01000011 01001111 01001101 01010000 01010101 01010100 01000101 01010010 01010011
Joseph Fenn
Larry your all wet on most of what you said. "Flaw in the rom"??????
If there was a flaw in the rom you would return the unit for a good
one "no flaws allowed in ROM ships" and loosing os would be impossible
without the flaws. So I say again for any "I mean any" virus to
get into my rom chips, the guy spreading the virus must knock on my
door and carry his eprom burner in his hands and request permission
to enter my computer room and reburn my ROM. Are you nuts???
Cameron Kaiser
>Larry your all wet on most of what you said. "Flaw in the rom"??????
>If there was a flaw in the rom you would return the unit for a good
>one "no flaws allowed in ROM ships" and loosing os would be impossible
>without the flaws. So I say again for any "I mean any" virus to
>get into my rom chips, the guy spreading the virus must knock on my
>door and carry his eprom burner in his hands and request permission
>to enter my computer room and reburn my ROM. Are you nuts???
There would be no virus in the ROM chips, but are all your applications
going to be running out of ROM? Many of them will be on disk or in memory,
and a virus can get at those.
--
Cameron Kaiser * cka...@floodgap.com * posting with a Commodore 128
personal page: http://www.armory.com/%7Espectre/
** Computer Workshops: games, productivity software and more for C64/128! **
** http://www.armory.com/%7Espectre/cwi/ **
krs...@nospamnetscape.net
Joseph Fenn wrote:
The virus might not be able to touch your OS, but it could still blast
every file on your hard disk. Doesn't need to mod the OS in any way to
do this so you could still boot your machine but would have no apps or
data.
-R
Riccardo Rubini
> There would be no virus in the ROM chips, but are all your
> applications going to be running out of ROM? Many of them will be on
> disk or in memory, and a virus can get at those.
Qark of VLAD managed to infect AMI BIOS flash ROMs many years ago, hooking
INT 19H. You can find more informations the VLAD#2 magazine, titled "Flash
Bios!".
VLAD is the australian vx group also responsible of the first ever Win95
virus, the "Bizatch" ( aka Boza ), written by Quantum. The group doesn't
exist anymore, nowadays.
Riccardo
Jim MacKenzie
really weren't connected at all in any direct way, only through terminals -
and that the Internet as such didn't exist until after the C64 and 128 had
passed their prime - and that even when connected the connect rates were
very slow) pretty much guaranteed that there would be no viruses. Even
notwithstanding all of the above, the C64 didn't boot off anything, so it
was hard to create a bootstrap virus, if not impossible.
There were, however, Trojan horses. I'm sure there have been for all
platforms.
Jim
Joseph Fenn
My point to both of you is not "transit stuff" such as did you save
your spreadsheet to disk last time you updated it et al ad infinitum!
If you dont do that every time you use the needed machine then your
in a hopeless bind and open to anything that comes aloong.
Having said that, my OS on the C128 will remain undisturbed.
My DOS/in/ROM remains undisturbed by any virus. None of this is true
for any PC platform since its gate is wide upen and the OS is a
beast to redo everytimg a virus strikes. Thats why I do A clone
image with Ghost on the PC laptops frequently. Even if the laptop
OS gets creamed takes maybe 15 minutes to restore the entire image.
But the part about "transit stuff" still applies. Another evasive
measure for pc users is to stop being pc users and go to Redhat
Linux, or even MAC systems. It seems the virus junkies around the
world want their virus' to affect the greatest nr of users possible,
and they dont concentrate so much on MAC OS nor LINUX, nor UNIX.
Joe (aka kilroy)
win95 in rom dos6.22 in rom would make the pc's attractive!!!!!!
Joseph Fenn
the difference, you can burn them on the fly hence virus can
also access. True ROM chips are invincible. Remember the guy
has to enter your computer shack with his eprommer device in order
to make his day!!!! Dont add all those superflous things like
flash roms, data files lost etc. Even on the C128 I save my
data files to floppies everytime I update them. Thats common
sense!!!!
Joe (aka kilroy)
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* Ham KH6JF AARS/MARS ABM6JF QCWA WW2 VET WD RADIO *
****************************************************
Joseph Fenn
No way Jose!!!!1
(also Commodores still are in their prime with fancy stuff like
RAMLINK instant up live ram which is faster than some pentiums)!!!!
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* Ham KH6JF AARS/MARS ABM6JF QCWA WW2 VET WD RADIO *
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Sam Gillett
Joseph Fenn wrote ...
>Your last line below is a fallacy Jim !!!!
>
>> There were, however, Trojan horses. I'm sure there have been for all
>> platforms.
Jim was right. There have been Trojans for the Commodore 64. I've run
across two personally.
One was a hacked version of Lynx that would dump a buffer full of trash to
the directory track of your disk. The other was a hacked version of
Velvetta that also trashed the directory track.
Best regards,
Sam Gillett aka Mars Probe @ Starship Intrepid 1-972-221-4088
Last 8-bit BBS in the Dallas area. Commodore lives!
J. Robertson
wrote:
>
>Joseph Fenn wrote ...
>
>>Your last line below is a fallacy Jim !!!!
>>
>>> There were, however, Trojan horses. I'm sure there have been for all
>>> platforms.
>
>Jim was right. There have been Trojans for the Commodore 64. I've run
>across two personally.
Correct. One is called "HIV" and another is called IIRC "BHP". The
programs to find and erradicate them can be found in the usual CBM
place on Funet.
>One was a hacked version of Lynx that would dump a buffer full of trash to
>the directory track of your disk. The other was a hacked version of
>Velvetta that also trashed the directory track.
Interesting!
Jason
--
E-mail #1: jkr[at]westol.com
E-mail #2: jk...@juno.com
(Use E-mail #1 for a quicker response.)
Web site : http://www.westol.com/~jkr/
--
Larry Anderson
"J. Robertson" wrote:
>
> On Thu, 21 Aug 2003 21:17:40 GMT, "Sam Gillett" <samgi...@msn.com>
> wrote:
>
> >One was a hacked version of Lynx that would dump a buffer full of trash to
> >the directory track of your disk. The other was a hacked version of
> >Velvetta that also trashed the directory track.
>
> Interesting!
>
I know of the Lynx one, (from a on interview with the author) it was
actually a protection to ensure the author's name in the program, if
someone used a hex editor to take out the author's name the program
would see the change and do it's damage. The reason it became well
known is some sysop on Compuserve did just that and then uploaded it to
their Commodore file library. A lot of users who downloaded paid for
the sysop's sneakyness.
Probably Velveeta did the same thing.
Most of the time I've seen people do the trojan thing on the 64 is they
rename something like the "10 second format" program into the name of
some game.
Larry
J. Robertson
<foxn...@bigvalley.net> wrote:
>I know of the Lynx one, (from a on interview with the author) it was
>actually a protection to ensure the author's name in the program, if
>someone used a hex editor to take out the author's name the program
>would see the change and do it's damage. The reason it became well
>known is some sysop on Compuserve did just that and then uploaded it to
>their Commodore file library. A lot of users who downloaded paid for
>the sysop's sneakyness.
Bet that was fun to deal with. Did it just delete files or do some
other mischevious disk damage?
>Probably Velveeta did the same thing.
>
>Most of the time I've seen people do the trojan thing on the 64 is they
>rename something like the "10 second format" program into the name of
>some game.
A poor man's virus or a very bad joke. ;-)
mykrowyre
> much less any with sophistication (the only known Commodore 64 virus,
> took something like 6k, which is a VERY noticible chunk of RAM).
>
> b) given the commercial software's refusal to return use of the 64 to
> the user prompting a "power-off reset" did wonders for preventing
> viruses from moving from program to progam (again the known 64 virus
> required BASIC and that you had to have the 64 not be reset from program
> to program).
Well, that doesnt mean the OS is invulnerable to viruses. A simple ML virus
could attach to any ML program on floppy, and when executed attach itself to
other files during disk access whenever a LOAD "$",8,1 is executed. Seems
simple enough to me.
-tom
mykrowyre
(and
> really weren't connected at all in any direct way, only through
terminals -
> and that the Internet as such didn't exist until after the C64 and 128 had
Well I dont think that's it, since the amiga wasn't permenantly connected to
the internet either, but it was full of viruses. I think it had more to do
with the the timeframe than it did the hardware.
-tom
Larry Anderson
'hooks' to get things to work behind BASIC were pretty primitive and
usually disabled when most programs ran (especially games which usually
did a free-for all on any non-needed zero page space.)
Any long activity during a load "$",8 (not ,1 that would put the
directory at address $0401) which 'loads' the directory into memory -
would probably make the user reset the computer, probably thinking there
was an alignment problem with the disk. On thr other hand with modern
PCs disk activity during the OS being idle is common.
Larry
--
Larry Anderson
But in the Amiga's case it does have a sophisticated DOS, and did not
always need to be reset to load other programs, also the floppies did
have 'boot sectors' for the virus code to attach to. Boot sectors for
the Commodore machines didn't show up till the 128 |(and that was only
in 128 mode).
Larry
--
Joseph Fenn
obviously you dont understand rom versus ram chips even!.
Again no virus coming in off internet can affect the CBM stuff for
reasons I stated before!!!!!!!
Joe
mykrowyre
> obviously you dont understand rom versus ram chips even!.
> Again no virus coming in off internet can affect the CBM stuff for
> reasons I stated before!!!!!!!
Joe, I'm very clear on the difference between ROM and RAM. I'm an embedded
software developer and have designed and built my own robot controllers with
various CPUs/MPUs (8085, 6811, 6502, etc, and I'm not talking about
assembling PC components) using ROM, EPROM, and EEPROMs for program storage.
I never entered the discussion regarding viruses and ROM based OSs. My
discussion was relating to viruses and the Commodore 64. Its completely
possible to write a successful virus on the commodore 64. Just because
someone hasnt done it doesnt mean it's not possible.
Now, regarding your ROM OS being safe from viruses, keep in mind that it's
not going to be the OS image that gets infected with a virus. It's the RAM
that it's running in. Unless all of your files and applications are read
only at the hardware level, you are still open for virus infection. Once an
executable file is infected and the virus is resident in memory, it can do
whatever it pleases with your filesystem. You can turn off the machine and
clear the virus from memory, but once you reboot and execute the infected
programs you're back to square one.
Also, a "virus" comming off of the internet is incredibly vague. There are
worms, email trojans, exe viruses etc, which are all transmitted on the
internet at some point whether by file infection or it's own TCP transport
via exploitation of network service bugs.
For example: Suppose I wrote a virus that attached to executable C64
programs. How would I do this? How about releasing an infected speed loader
as a d64 image on the internet? You run the speed loader before loading
other software...and before or after it loads a file, it infects it. This is
basic virus 101.
-tom