SCA (computer virus)
From Free net encyclopedia
The SCA virus was the first computer virus created for the Commodore Amiga. It appeared in November 1987. The SCA virus was a boot sector virus. It featured a quite famous line of text that appeared at every 15th reboot:
- Something wonderful has happened
- Your AMIGA is alive !!! and, even better...
- Some of your disks are infected by a VIRUS !!!
- Another masterpiece of The Mega-Mighty SCA !!
"SCA" is an acronym for the Swiss Cracking Association, a group engaged in software protection removal, so the geographic origin of the virus was Switzerland. The virus was probably authored by an SCA member known as "CHRIS".
SCA would not harm disks per-se, but would spread to any write-enabled floppies inserted. If they used custom bootblocks (such as games), they would be rendered unusable. SCA also checksums as an original filesystem (OFS) bootblock so would destroy newer filesystems if the user didn't know the proper use of the "install" command to remove SCA ("install df0: FFS FORCE" to recover a 'fast filesystem' floppy).
The "Mega-Mighty SCA" produced the first Amiga virus checker which killed the SCA virus. This may well have been in response to estimates that approximately 40% of all Amiga users had SCA in their disk collection somewhere, due to rampant piracy.
Other authors inspired by the harmless SCA virus would later produce more destructive viruses known as the Byte Bandit and the Byte Warrior.
External links
- http://www.sca.ch/ -- Swiss Cracking Association's homepage