Anticmos

Please read the instructions for disinfecting master boot record viruses that do not store the boot sector.

Anticmos is a typical boot sector virus. It infects the master boot sector of hard disks and the boot sector of floppy disks. The original floppy boot sector or master boot sector is not preserved on infection.

This virus has a warhead which randomly attempts to wipe part of the CMOS setup to make the PC unbootable. Fortunately, a bug means that it never seems to trigger successfully. The payload attempts to trigger in December 1993.

Variants: Anticmos Lixi (alias: Anticmos B, August 1994) contains the text string 'I am Li Xibin!'.