It's not really like I was doing anything that I was supposed to wasn't supposed to. After all, even though I was primarily there as manager of the technical support department, given my research and background they had said that I should look into forms of security and antivirus protection for the company. But, equally, let's face it: this really was more part of my ongoing reviews of antiviral products.
So this was a product that was new to me. I don't think the company that had produced it had really researched the field of computer viruses very extensively. The product said that it would protect against all computer viruses, and particularly computer viruses that were of the boot sector infector type. It was software, so this might have been a little bit problematic. However, others had done it before them.
One of the products that had done it before them, and extremely effectively, was DISKSECURE. Not only was DISKSECURE extremely effective, but it was also free. And, I knew the author. I used disk secure on all of my own machines. I had also installed it, for Gloria, at her workplace. DISKSECURE not only protected against computer viruses, and particularly the boot sector infector type, but it also allowed you to effectively password protect your computer, which was, generally speaking, not available with MS-DOS computers at the time. The fact that we had used DISKSECURE to protect Gloria's computer allowed us to detect the fact that someone was trying to break into her computer after hours.
Anyway, I had installed DISKSECURE on my computer, at *my* office. And, now I was trying out another antivirus product.
I installed the test antivirus product on my own computer. And then, in order to make sure that it worked, I tried to infect the computer with a simple BSI virus. And, lo and behold, the computer got infected. The test antivirus product obviously didn't protect against boot sector infector viruses. At least not the simple one that I tried first. So, that was a black mark against it, and I got another (free) antivirus product to clean off the virus.
Only to find that the test antivirus product, which had not protected against the virus infection, now prevented the antivirus disinfector from cleaning the virus infection.
So, I tried to uninstall the test antivirus. Only to find that, probably due to some corruption involved in the virus infection, the test antivirus could no longer be uninstalled.
So, to recap, at this point I had a computer with a an ineffective test antivirus product installed on it, which had not prevented an infection, so the computer was infected with a virus, but the test antivirus would not allow an antivirus disinfector to clean the virus off.
Fortunately, DISKSECURE had another trick up its sleeve. One of the options that DISKSECURE gave you, when you installed it on your computer in the first place, was to create a backup copy of your boot sector. And it also provided a function that would allow you to, in a fairly brute force fashion, use the backup copy of the boot sector to overwrite anything that had happened to the boot sector. For example, a virus infection.
So I used this brute force overriding replacement to put the original boot sector back onto my computer. And, lo and behold, the computer was clean, and uninfected, and I was back in business. With a little extra cleaning up to do.
I immediately terminated the test antivirus, with extreme prejudice. And, obviously, that particular antivirus product got a rather scathing review. It was not recommended.
DISKSECURE, on the other hand, was extremely useful, in quite a variety of situations. I kept on using it quite extensively over the years.
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