Lostman - virus (boot)

Home Users: Low
- Corporate Users: Low
Date Discovered: 7/14/2003
Date Added: 3/24/2004
Origin: Unknown
Length: N/A
Type: Virus
SubType: Boot

Virus Characteristics

Lostman is a memory resident, Master Boot Record (MBR)/Boot Sector infecting virus.


Indications of Infection

There are no obvious signs of infection


Method of Infection

The only way to infect a computer with an MBR/Boot Sector infector is to attempt to boot from an infected floppy diskette. The boot sector of the diskette has the code to determine if the diskette is bootable, and to display the "Non-system disk or disk error" message. It is this code that harbors the infection. By the time the non-system disk error message comes up, the infection has occurred.

Once the virus is executed, it will infect the hard drive's MBR and the hard drive's Boot Sector and may become memory resident. With every subsequent boot, the virus will be loaded into memory and will attempt to infect floppy diskettes accessed by the machine. The hard disk infection technique is not common because the both system areas of a hard disk are infected simultaneously.



http://us.mcafee.com/virusInfo/default.asp?id=description&virus_k=101133