New F-Secure TOTAL commercial is now something that offers a more comprehensive protection than ever before the commercial says. In their latest commercial, they use a Commodore Amiga 3000. The commercial focuses on Internet security, VPN, password manager and home protection in one smart package.
Byte Bandit and Lamer Exterminator is one of the most famous Amiga Viruses
Some commented on the video this: “I used Amigas for years and never saw a single virus.” and then someone answered a very nice reply: “I used Amiga for years and seen plenty! The first one was called the SCA Virus and was very common in the late 80’s. It wrote to the boot block and stayed in memory and would infect all other disks inserted. All it did was display a message on the screen, but it would destroy commercial games when it wrote itself to the bootblock.”
Beside the PC operating systems today. Amiga 3000 or any other Amiga model, was one of the machines back in the time with the absolute biggest virus coding activity. This resulted in many Amiga viruses made that could destroy original software and games on floppies. Later when people started to get AmigaOS running on HD these Amiga viruses also became a threat in AmigaOS itself too.
Because of the increasing amount of Amiga viruses, Virus Z and Virus Checker anti-virus apps for AmigaOS became very popular. Especially VirusZ. This Danish made app got updates several times, because of the increased amount of viruses for Amiga. Today AmigaOS platform got almost no viruses. Especially AmigaOS 4, MorphOS and AROS. But they too can be affected from the 68k AmigaOS viruses. So, be aware!
Norwegian Amiga magazines did Amiga virus Coverage a lot
This picture above shows one of the updated lists of new Amiga viruses in 1993. This was printed into the Amiga Forum issue which was sent out to kiosks and subscribers back in 1993. The title says 53 news viruses since the last time! So, now you know that AmigaOS was one of the operating systems that was most affected by viruses back in 1993.
These Amiga viruses were categorised as file viruses, link viruses, bomb viruses and trojan bomb types of viruses. But the most interesting part today is all of the names. As you can see on the list above. They got pretty intense names. These were Black Night, Christmas Violator, Disgust, Excrement Installer, Fuck device, Highlander and Suicide to name a few. Also, the most known ones like Byte Bandit, Lamer Exterminator, Saddam and CCCP were quite serious viruses too since they stayed in the memory of Amiga and could make peoples favourite Amiga games stop working. Yes! Even without any hard drive connected to the Amiga.
What kind of Amiga viruses do you remember?
Source: F-Secure Advert
