Posted by Virus Bulletin on Jan 28, 2016
This Throwback Thursday, VB heads back to 1993, when an ordinary memory-resident master boot sector virus spiced things up with a bit of pop trivia.
Over recent years we have become used to hearing about ransomware extorting money from victims by locking up their devices and demanding a ransom in order for access to the device to be restored. Back in 1993, however, before malware had truly become linked with monetary gain, there was a device hold-up of a different kind: know your pop trivia or face losing your data.
The creator of the Peter-II virus seemingly fancied himself as some sort of quiz master and set the haplesss victims of his boot sector virus a pop trivia challenge: get the answers right and your hard disk would be recovered, but get the answers wrong and all your data would be lost...
In July 1993, Eugene Kaspersky brought us a full analysis of Peter-II — including the answers to the trivia questions, should you ever need to know them.
Read Eugene Kaspersky's analysis of Peter-II here in HTML-format, or download it here as a PDF.
Posted on 28 January 2016 by Helen Martin
