

MS-DOS Viruses in Action - adamnemecek
http://www.wired.com/design/2013/10/15-awesome-looking-viruses-from-the-ms-dos-era/

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DanBC
40Hex was an ezine about viruses. People might be interested in reading
documents from back then.
[http://www.textfiles.com/magazines/40HEX/](http://www.textfiles.com/magazines/40HEX/)

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abollaert
I still have the "Little Black book of computer viruses". I just got my first
AT computer then (a 486DX). Very entertaining stuff that was...

[http://home.swipnet.se/smaffy/asm/info/vir.pdf](http://home.swipnet.se/smaffy/asm/info/vir.pdf)

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bobowzki
swipnet is still alive :-)

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danjayh
The difference between viruses then (most did little real harm, left your
computer in perfectly working state, and were meant to show off the skills of
the writer) and now (network zombies used to make people money, or replace web
content with ads) is kind of depressing.

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ComputerGuru
To be honest, back then most computers didn't have a direct connection to the
online world.. and even if they did, it was rarely always-on.

But it's not all sunshine and roses, do you remember the scourge of toll-
dialer viruses (that made your dial-up modem call a toll number that bills by
the minute, money going to the attacker) from back in the day? There were a
rare few that could even figure out ways to silence your dial-up tone so you
wouldn't be guaranteed to instantly find out you'd been infected..

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caf
That was just an AT command:

    
    
      ATM0

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ComputerGuru
That's assuming DOS had the right drivers for your card loaded, and that your
card respected that option... I came across many that didn't, esp. the "cheap"
knockoffs of the leading brands.

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ksk
Drivers? Do you mean software-modems? Majority of the modems AFAIK were
hardware modems which just connect over the COM ports, and you can echo any
command there.

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gesman
INT 13(CD13) - feel the power to format the hard drive in less than 8 bytes of
code. Good old days :)

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kjackson2012
No reference to the stoned virus? I remember that being extremely widespread,
despite not having the Internet to easily propagate it.

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voltagex_
I wonder how many of these run in DOSBOX

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Auguste
You may be able to get them working in a FreeDOS virtual machine.

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blueblob
Awesome how much creativity these hackers had. The graphics are surprisingly
pretty amazing for some of this stuff.

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yeukhon
The awkward moment when I clicked on a web page with MS virus in action, while
browsing the awesome gifs, the site decided to play ad suddenly like this (
[http://i.imgur.com/6I3WTUX.png](http://i.imgur.com/6I3WTUX.png))...

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cubancigar11
I remember this. All these 'viruses' are from a book about virus. I still have
it somewhere in my hometown. It had a floppy with demo programs.

Wired has really run out of content to post :)

