AntiCMOS is a
boot virus. Its first discovery was at
Lenart,
Slovenia
Slovenia ( ; sl, Slovenija ), officially the Republic of Slovenia (Slovene: , abbr.: ''RS''), is a country in Central Europe. It is bordered by Italy to the west, Austria to the north, Hungary to the northeast, Croatia to the southeast, an ...
, which led to its alias of Lenart. It was isolated in
Hong Kong
Hong Kong ( (US) or (UK); , ), officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China (abbr. Hong Kong SAR or HKSAR), is a city and special administrative region of China on the eastern Pearl River Delta i ...
several times at the beginning of 1994, but did not become common until it spread to
North America in the Spring of 1995. AntiCMOS is a fairly standard boot virus, and is primarily notable for being one of the few
DOS
DOS is shorthand for the MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS family of operating systems.
DOS may also refer to:
Computing
* Data over signalling (DoS), multiplexing data onto a signalling channel
* Denial-of-service attack (DoS), an attack on a communicat ...
viruses to remain in the wild as of 2020.
AntiCMOS is so named because it has the intended effect of erasing all
CMOS information. This does not occur because of a bug in the virus code. This is true of all AntiCMOS variants that have appeared in the wild. The payload date of December 1993 and the obsolete nature of these variants makes it very unlikely that AntiCMOS's payload will ever be a threat.
AntiCMOS.B
AntiCMOS.B is a boot virus. It was isolated in mid-1995. Like AntiCMOS.A, AntiCMOS.B became common worldwide. However, this variant never reached the success level of the original, and is now considered obsolete.
Infected
floppy disks contain the following text:
: I am Li Xibin
Additionally, AntiCMOS.B attempts to play a tune, but this fails due to coding error
AntiCMOS.B is otherwise a typical boot virus, much like its predecessor.
AntiCMOS.C
AntiCMOS.C is a boot virus and very minor variant of the AntiCMOS family. Unlike AntiCMOS and AntiCMOS.B, AntiCMOS.C remained in the field for a very short period of time, and is now considered entirely obsolete.
References
{{Reflist
External links
SophosF-Secure
Boot viruses