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.

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