VirTest v93A. (c) 1992 Ed T. Toton III
All Rights Reserved.


"The only truly secure system is one that is powered off,
cast in a block of concrete and sealed in a lead lined
room with armed guards - and even then I have my doubts."

-- Eugene H. Spafford



Disclaimer:
No responsibility can be claimed for your use of these texts and programs
whatsoever. If something goes wrong, it was something YOU did!


Overview:

VirTest is a virus quiz program with two quizzes. The first is to see
how much you know about viruses. The second is to test how much risk
you are under in terms of getting a viral infection.

Included is a text file called VIRUS_MYTHS. It is a file about myths
about computer viruses. I found it to be very accurate and complete and
I believe it will be of great use to you. I suggest you take the quiz
before reading it, so as to get a feel for what areas you need to patch
up.

I included the source code with this package. Feel free to look through
it, but remember that it is protected by copyright, and you may not
distribute modified copies of it.


Things you can do to prepare, to save yourself grief later:

1. Make a clean write protected bootable floppy. You can make a floppy
bootable by formatting with the /S command, or by running the dos
program "SYS.COM" on a formatted disk.

2. Write down your hard-drive settings in CMOS.

3. Make backups of your boot sector and partition table. There are many
anti-viral packages and utilities with which you can do this.

4. Try to obtain a decent virus detection program. There are many on the
market, if you don't want to cough up buckets of cash, then I suggest
McAfee's ViruScan, Frisk Software's F-Prot, or other shareware scanners.
You can use them and get updates without paying an arm or a leg, if you
are willing to go without the nice user friendly environments and repair
features.


Things you should do if you get a virus attack:

1. TURN OFF THE COMPUTER! Memory Resident Viruses can survive warmboots,
so power cuts are the only sure-fire way to get them out of memory.
Also, why risk the chance that it will start systematically destroying
files on your hard disk?

2. Boot from a clean write protected disk, or not at all.
Continue to do so until you are sure the system is once
again virus-free.

3. Use a scanner to try to find the virus.

4. Contact a computer user-group, or other computer-literate groups.
They'll either have some suggestions as to what to do, or refer you
to someone who can help.
- OR -
Use a software system that is designed to remove viruses.



Continue to boot from a clean write-protected floppy until you are certain
there is no boot-infecting virus left on the system.

If it is a file infector that hit you, you must find out which programs
are infected, and either delete or repair them. But whatever you do, DO
NOT RUN THEM! Thus, it is suggested that you don't run anything on your
hard drive until you have discovered the problem.



Final Notes:

Be sure to read "VIRUS_MY.THS", it has valuable information.

If you encounter any Virus or Trojan Horse programs, please send them to
me. My address follows below. Be careful not to damage your data, or
re-infect your system. Please put a label on the disk with the words
"DANGEROUS PROGRAM" written in large letters.

Send it to:

Ed T. Toton III
7101 Talisman Lane
Columbia, MD 21045


Or call my BBS, the Sorcerer's Quarters, at (410)-290-3752, and upload it.
Make sure you put a description that indicates that it is a dangerous file.

Thanx..

Sincerely,
Ed T. Toton III