?OLD? virus infects ?NEW? Vista

A consignment of laptops from German manufacturer Medion, sold through German and Danish branches of giant retail chain Aldi, have been found to be infected with the boot sector virus ?Stoned.Angelina?, first seen as long ago as 1994 and last included on the official WildList in 2001. According to German sources, anywhere between 10,000 and 100,000 systems may be infected, but as the machines apparently ship without floppy drives the virus is unlikely to spread. The systems come pre-installed with Windows Vista and Bullguard anti-virus, which will warn of the ?harmless? infection on booting the machines, but is unable to remove it.

About Stoned.Angelina from Symantec

The boot virus code is one sector in length with the infectious code being stored at side 0, track 0, sector 1 and the original master boot record code being stored at side 0, track 0 sector 2. On floppy disks, Stoned.Angelina calculates the last sector of the root directory and uses this location to store a copy of the original DOS boot sector.

In addition to standard viral replication, Stoned.Angelina contains a block of code designed to stealth (by means of redirection) any reads to the physical location side 0, track 0 sector 1 on both floppy disks and hard disks.

Contained within the virus code body is the following encrypted text, which is never displayed on the screen: Greetings for ANGELINA!!!/by Garfield/Zielona Gora