This Stoned variant will activate on the birthday of Michelangelo
Bounnaroti, who was born on March 6. 1475. It will then overwrite most
of the hard disk. Structurally it is similar to the 'Stoned' virus, but
it will infect non-360K diskettes correctly.
It is not an easy task task to recover from the activation of
Michelangelo. The virus overwrites the first 17 sectors on
heads 0-3 on the first 256 tracks of the disk the machine
has been booted from.
There are several known variants of this virus - some of them do
not activate at all. There are also at least two file viruses that
occasionally 'drop' the Michelangelo virus to hard drives master
boot sector, namely Prague.Pizza and HLLC.Enrico.A.
Michelangelo used to be very widespread in the early 1990s.
Nowadays it is almost extinct.
