Disinfectant 3.2

April 21, 1993

Disinfectant 3.2 is a new release of our free Macintosh anti-viral 
utility.

Version 3.2 detects the new INIT-M virus.

The INIT-M virus was discovered at Dartmouth College in April, 1993. 

INIT-M is a malicious virus. It is designed to trigger on any Friday the 
13th. The virus severely damages a large number of folders and files. 
File names are changed to random 8 character strings. Folder names 
are changed to random 1-8 character strings. File creators and types 
are changed to random 4 character strings. This changes the icons 
associated with the files and destroys the relationship between 
programs and their documents. File creation and modification dates 
are changed to Jan. 1, 1904. In some cases, one file or folder on a disk 
may be renamed "Virus MindCrime". In some very rare circumstances, 
the virus may also delete a file or files.

Note that the next three Friday the 13ths are in August 1993, 
May 1994, and January 1995.

The virus can also sometimes cause problems with the proper 
display of windows.

The virus only spreads and attacks under System 7.0 or later. It does 
not spread or attack under System 6. The Disinfectant protection INIT, 
however, will detect an infected application under any system.

The virus infects all kinds of files, including extensions, applications, 
preference files, and document files.

The virus creates a file named "FSV Prefs" in the Preferences folder. 
If you use Disinfectant to repair an infected system, it will delete 
this file.

The damage caused by the INIT-M virus is very similar to that caused 
by the INIT 1984 virus. Despite this similarity, the two viruses are 
very different in other respects, and should not be confused.

Version 3.2 also contains two other changes:

There was an error in version 3.1 in the changes made to the damaged 
file detection code. This error affected only a very few people with very 
rare kinds of damaged files. Version 3.2 fixes the problem. Thanks to
Stephen Lardieri of Princeton University for helping to find and fix this
error.

Disinfectantıs preferred memory partition has been increased from 
700K to 1000K. This fixes a problem scanning some specific applications 
with very large CODE resources, including PSpice and Intellidraw. Thanks
to the many users who reported this problem.

Disinfectant 3.2 is available now via anonymous FTP from site 
ftp.acns.nwu.edu [129.105.113.52], file 
pub/disinfectant/disinfectant32.sea.hqx. It will also be available 
soon from most of the other popular sources of free and shareware 
software.

John Norstad
Academic Computing and Network Services
Northwestern University
j-norstad@nwu.edu