You can recover your data if you have a backup copy, but the person we're talking about probably hasn't made a backup in five years. Michelangelo has spawned a public information drive on campus, however.
The school's computer center has published notices in the student newspaper as well as employee newsletters. At the 25,student University of Utah, David Hoisve, project director for the university's computer center, said there have been no reports of Michelangelo on that campus, but he said the virus has made limited appearances in surrounding Salt Lake City: "The numbers seem to be at this point really, really low.
Hoisve said that although Michelangelo is destructive and computer users should know about it, "of all the things that can screw up a computer system, viruses are low on the list.
USU, a 15,student campus, has some 2, computers, enough to make a comprehensive search-and-destroy mission difficult, said Johnson.
Unlike many computer viruses, Michelangelo can't be spread by modem connection. Floppy discs are the vectors that carry it from machine to machine, and once in a machine, it infects every floppy disc booted onto that machine. The discs, in turn, infect other machines. Though computers can be reset to eliminate the date of a virus' activation, the best safeguard against Michelangelo and other viruses is software designed to find and destroy the invader.
But much of the protective software on the market is a few months behind the latest generation of virus, said Johnson, so computer users are probably best protected by getting virus-combatting software from non-traditional sources, usually via modem between telephone-linked computers.
Hoisve said a virus hunter called F-Prot, created by Frisk Software International, is among the most effective against Michelangelo. F-Prot is in the public domain, so it is free of charge and can be obtained from various computer bulletin boards in the Salt Lake Valley. Hoisve said it is also available on inexpensive corporate-license terms for commercial use. Michelangelo appeared about a year ago in Sweden; its origins are unknown and experts say they don't know what motivated its creator.
The loathing comes from the antivirus communities who have to endure yet another year of attention lavished on a virus which, in relative terms, is benign. So far today, no sign of a Michelangelo "attack" has shown up in virus newsgroups or on many virus alerts sites. Sites with databases of well-known viruses such as Symantec , Dr. Solomon , and Data Fellows haven't published any warnings yet. Michelangelo, the virus, has achieved mythic proportions.
As probably the first computer virus to which many were exposed, it has captured the attention of the American public and held it for six years. When Michelangelo showed up on the scene, "people were not yet used to thinking of viruses as an everyday threat," explained Sarah Gordon, an antivirus researcher at the IBM Thomas J.
Watson Research Center in an email interview. As a virus, she added, "Michelangelo was pretty easy to quantify. To be sure, Michelangelo is threatening. If detonated, it could wipe out your hard drive. But if you actually use a virus protection program on your computer, your chances of getting hit by Michelangelo are just about zero.
When Michelangelo believed it was the date to deliver its payload, it would completely overwrite any diskettes present; on the first hard drive, the virus would overwrite a relatively small — but critical — area with random characters, making information retrieval practically impossible. But it only worked if the computer was running when the virus thought the date was March 6; otherwise, the payload was not triggered. Indeed, recommendations at the time were either to leave your computer turned off on that day, or to reset the system clock so that the computer thought it was not March 6.
Of course, far better was to remove the virus in the first place! Michelangelo was a variant of the Stoned virus. And although it is not known what the origin of this virus was, some speculated that it may have been created in Australia or New Zealand, although there was also the theory that it could have been developed in Sweden, Denmark or Holland.
One US citizen in the antivirus industry estimated without corroborating evidence that by March 6, , Michelangelo would have managed to infect more than five million computers around the world, which generated much excitement and coverage in the media of the day.
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