Michelangelo

Classification

Category :

Malware

Type :

Virus

Aliases :

Michelangelo

Summary

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.

Removal

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.

Technical Details

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.