Summary

Cruel is a boot sector virus from Hungary. Unlike most other boot sector infectors, it overwrites the DOS boot sector.

Cruel activates by occasionally turning on the BIOS password. See description of the Raadioga virus for information on how to bypass this.

Cruel can be removed from diskettes and hard disks with the DOS SYS command.

Cruel.B variant was found on the original driver floppies for Maverick 12X CD-ROM drives from Optics Storage.

[Analysis: Mikko Hypponen, F-Secure]