michelangelo virus

The Michelangelo virus is a computer virus first discovered in April 1991 in New Zealand. [1] The virus was designed to infect MS-DOS systems and remain dormant until March 6, the birthday of Renaissance artist Michaelangelo.

On March 6, if the PC is an AT or a PS/2, the virus overwrites the hard disk with nulls. The virus assumes a geometry of 256 cylinders, 4 heads, 17 sectors per track.

On hard disks, the virus moves the original master boot record to cylinder 0, head 0, sector 7. Michelangelo Buonarroti (mīkəlăn`jəlō, Ital.

On floppy disks, if the disk is 360 KB, the virus moves the original boot sector to cylinder 0, head 1, sector 3.

On other disks, the virus moves the original boot sector to cylinder 0, head 1, sector 14.

Although designed to infect MS-DOS systems, the virus can easily disrupt other operating systems installed on the system since, like many viruses, the Michaelangelo infects the master boot record of a hard drive. Once a system became infected, any floppy disk inserted into the system becomes immediately infected as well. And because the virus spends most of its time dormant, activating only on March 6, it is conceivable that an infected computer could go for years without detection — as long as it wasn't booted on that date after being infected. Antivirus Scan.

The virus first came to widespread international attention in January 1992, when it was revealed that a few computer and software manufacturers had accidentally shipped products, for example Intel's LANSpool print server, infected with the virus.