Boot sector virus

Virus spreading on disks

A boot sector virus is a virus that infects the master boot record of a storage device, usually a floppy disk or a hard drive but occasionally a CD. Many early viruses took this form as most information transfer required removable media to be passed from machine to machine or user to user.

Many boot sector viruses would run when a floppy was accessed and proceed to infect the boot sectors of hard drives. Then, running again whenever a system was rebooted, they would infect any floppies subsequently inserted into the machine's drives.

Notable boot sector viruses include the first PC virus 'Brain', 'Form', and 'Joshi'. The last boot sector viruses fell off the WildList in early 2006, but various types continue to appear in our prevalence reports and a batch of laptops infected with 'Stoned.Angelina' was released in Germany and Denmark in mid-2007. More recently, trojans have been observed using similar techniques to plant rootkits to hide their activities.

Poll

Are you still running IE 6?
Yes, on my machine at work
Yes, on my home machine
Yes, on both work and home machines
No, I use a newer version of IE
No, I use a different browser

Leave a comment
Jobs Career Sidebar

Virus Bulletin

In this month's magazine:
  • Social networking meets social engineering
  • Flying solo
  • Geneva convention
  • 7th German Anti Spam Summit 2009
  • Anti-phishing landing page: turning a 404 into a teachable moment
  • An update on spamming botnets: are we losing the war?
  • Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition SP2 x86
Virus Bulletin 10 2009
Subscribe now!
Virus Bulletin currently has 187,822 registered users.