Virus MDBF-B FTLComm - Tisdale September 10, 1999 Just like the picture taken Saturday night, things can be looking pretty good when that is not the case. (Warning:)This is a tale of computer technological trauma it is meant for a mature audience and might be unsettling to the computer neophyte Being able to get something new onto this web site every day has been a matter of pride

and dedication to accomplishing the task each and every day, so it was disturbing to discover Saturday morning that no amount of effort would solve the problem. The DNS server on which we relied was inoperative and would not be brought back into service until Tuesday morning. As it turned out it was not until Wednesday morning that it actual was back on line. This meant for the first time since I began the Ensign project in May of 98 that I had a weekend off and though I shot some pictures and kept my eyes open for stories, I was not under pressure to get something together for two days. My wife had brought home her Syquest removable drive from work and we intended to fix some databases she uses and the drive was connected to my system. As you can see up to this point things are looking good. When I connected up the Syquest I looked over the removable disk she was using and discovered that it had material I had given her more then two years ago. It was sort of like an archeological find, some documents I had made them, some promotional material from Faster Than Light and some network proposals. I opened each file and looked them over copied them over to an archive file and cleaned up her disk. We now fast forward to Tuesday morning when I come down to work and discover that I could not download the great pictures I took on Labour day at Battoche. A prospective customer came by and I was telling him of the virtues of the Macintosh and all the wonderful things it could do and then went to show him and low and behold nothing worked. Within minutes other important pieces of software began to fail. FileMaker Pro, ClarisWorks, Visual Page and Sherlock. These are the most important and vital pieces of software I use and depend on each and every day. I began the process of trying to find the problem and sort out what was causing me trouble. I have four hard drive volumes on my machine and two separate operating systems so I can move things around and work through most problems. But by noon Tuesday things were far worse then they had been at 9:00 and continuing to worsen. After you restart a machine thirty times and try this, that and the other thing a person starts to show signs of frustration. The assumption was that there was a system error or a hard drive error that had caused the problem and I set to work trying to find the villain Around midnight, number one son returned home from his extended long weekend to his home in Winnipeg and I told him of my problem. "you have a virus" he told me. It had never crossed my mind. Virus problems are for folks using Microsoft machines and who download evil files from the network, not for me a Mac user. The following morning I set to work, downloaded some anti-virus software and began hunting for the corrupting code. I was able to get my one drive to start but it alone was the only one working. I attempted to run the downloaded anti-virus software and of the three applications I had received, two were already corrupted with the bad code. By eleven that morning my computer was inoperative. There was nothing left for me to do, I had tried everything I knew of and things were worse to the point that I had no options. One factor that entered into this problem was that I could not boot my machine from its CD and I assumed this was a hardware problem. The decision was made, I was going to Winnipeg. I loaded the computer and its equipment in the van and I was on the road. Eight hours later I was in Winnipeg and number one son set to work on my machine. He quickly discovered that the CD problem was one of my own making but that alone did not solve things. The damage done by the virus was everywhere and the solution was to recover and back up all the data on the machine and its drives and reformat them and install new systems. Work began on this around 9:30 and concluded at 4:30. All my files strewn through the drives and chaos in charge. I got a couple of hours sleep and loaded things back in the van and headed back to Saskatchewan. Quite a saga, and in some ways pretty extreme. But a computer company like mine depends on its equipment and extreme measures are required in the face of failure. Now we have to consider the analysis of what caused the problem. MDBF-B is an old and well know Macintosh computer virus. It is about four years old. Three years ago it was spread across the Macintosh computer world by Apple Computers itself. The virus had found its way on to an Apple information CD that was sent out to everyone who sold Apple equipment. We received it at the time and used some of the good stuff on the CD. Shortly there after we were informed by a customer that there was a virus on the stuff we were putting on the complementary floppies we sent out with each order. Then we received replacement disks from Apple. At the time we cleaned up our drives and the matter was considered closed. MDBF and there are "A" and "B" versions of this virus is bad piece of code, it writes itself into the desktop database file, (Master database file - MDBF) any application or file you open is given this code and infected. At the time we were using variants of the operating System 7 and the nasty features of this virus were less troublesome and though it was present it did not cause applications to crash immediately. Well things have changed considerable since then, as I am using 8.6 and the way my G3 Blue and White handles applications is much differed and much faster. The result was the rather benign virus of the past is now a killer. File by file, application my application it moves itself around everything it infects becomes inoperative. In human terms, if small pox were released into our population now, it would be an even greater killer then it was originally, because we have ended out immunization for it and it would spread quickly and kill. The materials I had put on my wife's removable disk several years ago have laid dormant there all this time because she never opened or used those files. So when I discovered them and opened them, the virus was released into my unsuspecting and unprotected computer. When she used a disinfectant on that disk, they were no longer present, because I had removed the files from her disk and I had forgotten about the problem we had with that virus years ago. There is a lesson it this epic, more important to us as humans then in terms of the computer problems I experienced. With a society so heavily dependent on technology and machines we are definitely in danger. The experience I had with this virus was impressive: 1. Its first appearance was not recognised. 2. All attempts to solve perceived problems made things worse. 3. The high speed and more streamlined modern operating system was more vulnerable to the infection. 4. Attempts to repair its damage did more harm to the system magnifying the damage caused by the ----virus. 5. The incident was inevitable, certain to occur only the timing was random. If any of this makes you think about Y2K you are right. The elements that caused my problem are inherent in the old two digit code and we could sale into the new century without a hitch only to discover the bad stuff has already done the dirty deed.