Bye

Summary

Bye is a typical boot sector virus which infects the boot sectors of diskettes and the main boot records of hard disks. The virus is capable of infecting all common diskette types (360, 720, 1200 and 1440 kilobytes). Bye was discovered in Italy, at the end of September 1994.

The virus infects the hard disk when the computer is booted from an infected diskette. Once the hard disk is infected and the virus has loaded itself into memory, it shall infect all non-write protected diskettes used in the computer.

The virus contains the following encrypted text: "Bye by C&CL".

Bye uses stealth virus techniques, so its code cannot be seen on the hard disk's MBR while it is resident in memory.

The virus stores the original main boot record on the last sector of the hard disk's active partition. On diskettes, the virus stores the boot sector on the diskette's last sector.

The virus changes only 40 bytes in the boot sector - the rest of the viruse's code is stored elsewhere. Bye does this to avoid being detected by heuristic scanners.

Disinfection & Removal

Allow F-Secure Anti-Virus to disinfect the relevant files.

For more general information on disinfection, please see Removal Instructions.

Description Created: Mikko Hypponen, F-Secure