Finnish Sprayer was found in Finland in November 1993, and it quickly became very widespread in the southern parts of Finland.
The virus will only infect hard drives when an attempt to boot from an infected diskette is made. Once the virus has infected the hard drive, all non-protected floppies used in the machine will be infected. The virus contains the following unencrypted text: "Tks to B.B, Z-VirX ..... [Aija]".
Finnish Sprayer is two sectors long, and it stores the original boot sector and it's own code to the last sectors of the active partition.
The virus activates on the 25th of March. At this date it will overwrite most sectors of the active partition with random data, change the screen background to grey, and display the following text:
FINNISH_SPRAYER.1. Send your painting +358-0-xxxxxxx (FAX), [Aija]
This text is not visible in the virus code, since it has been encrypted with a XOR 50h operation.
Finnish Sprayer will not infect the hard disk if the active partitions file system is not DOS. This means that PC's running for example OS/2, DR-DOS with HD password protection, Windows NT or some UNIX variant will not be infected.
Virus uses stealth routines, so it cannot be found from hard disks MBR when it is active in memory. F-Secure anti-virus products will detect if Finnish Sprayer is resident, and will advise you to boot from a clean diskette.
Based on the settings of your F-Secure security product, it will either move the file to the quarantine where it cannot spread or cause harm, or remove it.
A False Positive is when a file is incorrectly detected as harmful, usually because its code or behavior resembles known harmful programs. A False Positive will usually be fixed in a subsequent database update without any action needed on your part. If you wish, you may also:
Check for the latest database updates
First check if your F-Secure security program is using the latest updates, then try scanning the file again.
Submit a sample
After checking, if you still believe the file is incorrectly detected, you can submit a sample of it for re-analysis.
Note: If the file was moved to quarantine, you need to collect the file from quarantine before you can submit it.
Exclude a file from further scanning
If you are certain that the file is safe and want to continue using it, you can exclude it from further scanning by the F-Secure security product.
Note: You need administrative rights to change the settings.
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