The SCA virus is the first computer virus created for the

Amiga Amiga is a family of personal computers introduced by Commodore in 1985. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16- or 32-bit processors, 256 KB or more of RAM, mouse-based GUIs, and significantly improved graphi ...

and one of the first to gain public notoriety. It appeared in November 1987. The SCA virus is a boot sector virus. It features a line of text that appears at every 15th copy after a warm reboot:

Something wonderful has happened Your AMIGA is alive !!! and, even better... Some of your disks are infected by a VIRUS !!! Another masterpiece of The Mega-Mighty SCA !!

"SCA" is an acronym for the Swiss Cracking Association, a group engaged in software protection removal, so the geographic origin of the virus was Switzerland. The virus is probably authored by an SCA member known as "CHRIS". SCA will not harm disks per se, but spreads to any write-enabled floppies inserted. If they use custom bootblocks (such as games), they are rendered unusable. SCA also checksums as an original filesystem (OFS) bootblock, hence destroying newer filesystems if the user doesn't know the proper use of the "install" command to remove SCA ("install df0: FFS FORCE" to recover a 'fast filesystem' floppy). The "Mega-Mighty SCA" produced the first Amiga virus checker which killed the SCA virus. This may well have been in response to estimates that approximately 40% of all Amiga users had SCA in their disk collection somewhere, due to rampant piracy. Other authors inspired by the harmless SCA virus would later produce more destructive viruses known as the

Byte Bandit Byte Bandit is a boot sector computer virus created for the Amiga personal computer. It first appeared in January 1988. In contrast to the feared Amiga viruses like the infamous Lamer Exterminator and SADDAM Saddam Hussein ( ; ar, � ...

and the Byte Warrior. The first line of the infection message refers to the 1986 movie

Short Circuit A short circuit (sometimes abbreviated to short or s/c) is an electrical circuit that allows a current to travel along an unintended path with no or very low electrical impedance. This results in an excessive current flowing through the circuit ...

and the subsequent computer game with the line "Something wonderful has happened... No. 5 is alive."

References

* Info magazine description of the virus

External links

Swiss Cracking Association's homepage

in the amiga archive of th

at Virus Help Team, Amiga Virus Encyclopedia
SCA-Virus description
at the now defunct Amiga Virus Encyclopedia * Swiss Cracking Association Archive
Part 1Part 2Part 3
— "got papers?" historical research project {{Hacking in the 1980s Amiga viruses Hacking in the 1980s