Viral Rewind: Virus.DOS.Devil

-----------------------------------------------------------
. To dance with the devil in the pale moonlight? Devil is a file-infecting virus with two payloads (the latter having an additional capability) for DOS. When Devil is run it does two things: It loads itself into memory so it can intercept any programs that are run and subsequently infect them (.COMs are certain, .EXEs are possible) and it will automatically infect all files in the present directory the virus is run from. So if the virus is run from the same directory that COMMAND.COM is located in, it will run every time the system boots loading the infected command interpreter.

The payloads: The first payload appears within 5-6 keystrokes after the virus is loaded: The cursor and typed letters will change to a random color with each keystroke. After several keystrokes are made Devil then changes the entire font color palette for DOS. For instance, after several keystrokes the font color palette will change to cyan. After another several keystrokes it changes to magenta. This repeats as long as the virus is active in memory. This effect however does not seem to continue to fullscreen programs like Microsoft Works.

The second payload occurs whenever the user uses ctrl-alt-del while the virus is present in memory. Upon doing so, Devil clears the screen and displays a black and white vertically-striped background with the text printed out to the screen:
"Have you ever danced with the devil under the weak light of the moon?"
"Pray for your disk!"
"The_Joker..."
"Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha"

The computer would then hard reset (causing a cold boot) if a particular criteria before the 2nd payload was initiated was not met. After the virus is loaded into memory it begins monitoring the number of keystrokes. If it measures at least 5,000 or more keystrokes and ctrl-alt-del is used, after the message finishes printing the payload would hang instead of rebooting the PC. This is because the payload erases the File Allocation Table (FAT) from the disk making access to data on the hard disk not possible. However with the variant I had this did not occur; just the payload hanged.

-------------------

[DJFoxyOfficial]

You planning to continue making Snap Circuits videos? Your videos on them were very well done!