Remember the Michelangelo virus? If you don’t remember, on March 6, 1992, Michelangelo was programmed to overwrite the first 100 sectors of a hard drive–not quite as destructive as formatting a drive, but to the average user, the effect is the same. It was a huge scare–John McAfee predicted five million computers would be affected–but largely was a non-event.
Those of you studying for security certifications would do well to remember that Michelangelo is a prime example of a virus and a logic bomb. Viruses replicate; logic bombs do something when an event triggers. Malware doesn’t always fit neatly into specific categories–crossovers are common.
My experience with the Michelangelo virus
I was in high school when it happened. Specifically, I was editing the student newspaper. I had advocated strongly moving the newspaper from pasteup to doing as much as possible via computer. In March, we would have been working on our third issue under this system. Let me tell you, everyone was apprehensive about whether we should turn on the computers that day.
Except for one thing: Michelangelo was a virus for IBM PCs and compatibles running DOS, and we did our newspaper work on Macintoshes. So on March 6, I marched into the computer lab, turned on the computers, and worked just like I would on any other day. Nothing happened.
I also defiantly walked into the next room and turned on the couple of IBM PS/2s sitting there. Nothing happened on those, either. Although they were technically vulnerable, there was no good way for them to get infected. They didn’t have hard drives, they weren’t on a LAN, they didn’t have modems, and the only disks that ever got used in the machines were stored on site. In 1992, people thought something was wrong with you if you carried floppy disks on you, so few people did. The worst that could have happened would have been those machines losing their boot floppies. They didn’t.
Eradicating Michelangelo
Eradicating Michelangelo was pretty easy–just run FDISK /MBR from DOS 5 or later. I may not have known that trick at the time, as I was still a die-hard Amigaholic in those days. I had a working knowledge of DOS and Windows 3.0/3.1, but my first PC-related job was still a couple of years away. Michelangelo just overwrote the first 100 bytes of the master boot record on your hard drive. Corrupt MBRs are easy to recover from.
The most significant thing about Michelangelo was that it was the first big virus scare. It was a non-event compared to malware that came later like the Melissa virus, Loveletter, or Code Red. But Michelangelo reflected the growing importance of computers in the 1990s. Michelangelo was the first virus that really caught the mainstream news media’s attention. For that matter, it was one of the first computer security issues of any kind to catch mainstream media attention.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.