Alcon, or RSY (which is more or less as commonly used of a name as Alcon), is a computer virus that was discovered to be spreading in Europe in 1997. It is a boot virus.
Infection
Alcon is a standard boot sector virus that spreads via floppies. Instead of the
MBR
MBR may refer to:
Computing
* Master boot record, the first sector of a partitioned data storage device, used for booting
* Memory buffer register
* Minimum bounding rectangle
* Minimum bit rate
Publications
* ''The Malaysia Book of Records''
* ...
, it infects the DBR, making some antivirus programs miss it.
Symptoms
Alcon contains no notable symptoms beyond one extremely damaging one, which is overwriting random information. Assuming that the overwrites are subtle, this may result in significant compounding data over time, as Alcon is a slow damager.
Alcon contains the text "R.SY".
Prevalence
Alcon was listed as being spreading by the WildLis
from April 1998 to July 1999. F-Secure lists it as having been common in Europe throughout 1997. Like most boot viruses, it is near extinct, although it was certainly in the last wave of boot viruses, so cases involving Alcon may be
false positives
A false positive is an error in binary classification in which a test result incorrectly indicates the presence of a condition (such as a disease when the disease is not present), while a false negative is the opposite error, where the test result ...
, but may also be due to older, unused infected disks resurfacing.
Aliases and variants
Alcon's most common alias is RSY, based on inclusions in the virus code. Other aliases include Kendesm, Ken&Desmond, and Ether. It is unknown where these names are derived from.
This virus is unrelated to
W32/Alcon W3 or W-3 may refer to:
* W3 (tram), a class of electric trams built by the Melbourne & Metropolitan Tramways Board
* W3, a postcode district in the W postcode area
* Apple W3, a wireless chip used in the Apple Watch Series 4.
* PZL W-3 Sokół, ...
.
References
{{reflist
F-Secure (RSY)
Boot viruses