
Why some computer viruses refuse to die - goldminer88
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44564709
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speeder
One past incident I had: I was working as intern in a tech support company.

We had there some 1.44mb discs with the game "Lotus III", so whenever we were
bored we would play a little.

One day I arrived at work... And they were scrambling all over the place using
ancient antivirus from same era as Lotus III... Found out we played that game
on tons of random computers and it was infected with a DOS vírus that could
actually copy itself to USB drives too... Whooops.

We caused outbreak of what was then an already obsolete virus. (Most of the
machines had windows 98 in them at best... The virus worked on then
surprisingly fine despite being intended for DOS, and in those machines
specifically it would infect USB)

~~~
jaclaz
>We caused outbreak of what was then an already obsolete virus. (Most of the
machines had windows 98 in them at best... The virus worked on then
surprisingly fine despite being intended for DOS, and in those machines
specifically it would infect USB)

Well, windows 98 was essentially a GUI over DOS, so that is not at all
"strange", what is more strange is the effect on USB, most probably the virus
would affect any mounted volume (at filesystem/mount level as opposed to
disk/mass storage).

As a side note, in _my time_ (only slightly earlier) Lotus (more properly
Lotus 1-2-3) was not at all a game but rather the "only" spreadsheet program
available, what a number of people would now call "an Excel spreadsheet" was
at the time a "Lotus spreadsheet".

~~~
speeder
Lotus series was some cool racing games that actually were intended for Amiga,
the DOS version not being just as good, but to me were still mind blowing.

Later when they were making a sequel it ended in Super Nintendo, with cars
changed (Lotus in the title referred to the car company) due to license
issues, spawning Top Gear series.

Lotus and Top Gear were wildly popular in Brazil, and thus recently a
Brazilian studio made a spiritual sucessor (including hiring the otigibaly
musician to make more of his very iconic music) that is named "Horizon Chase",
so if you curious about what is so fun in "Lotus" to spread a virus, play
Horizon Chase, gameplay is almost identical actually.

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dingo_bat
It has always seemed like an unending battle to me. The only way this ends is
to make an AI antivirus that can decide whether a particular software is
malicious or not.

~~~
craftyguy
> an AI antivirus

That already exists, and has existed for many years, it's called 'heuristics'.
Not quite as buzzwordy without hanging 'AI' on it though.

