When you get a laptop out of the box you have certain assumptions. One is that your brand new laptop is free of viral infection that could be a potential threat to your system. A new system should be free and clean of all those threats that you expose your system to once you take it online.
You may also assume that when you have to worry about your brand new Vista laptop getting a virus, it will be a new virus. After all your virus software should be able to protect your system against older viruses, as the definition files, the way that your
systems protection find and eliminate virus code from your system should be easily accessible to the computer. Even if your system got one of those older viruses your computer should be able to take care of things by itself, and spare you having to deal with any of the problems that are associated with the well known threat.
So, would it shock you to find out that a series of brand new, out of the box, Vista laptops were infected by a 13 year old virus? Well, it happened to more than 10,000 people (up to 100,000 depending on which sources you ask) who purchased a Vista laptop. The laptops came from the German company Medion. The company shipped out the laptops pre-infected with a boot sector virus. The laptops were the MD 96290 model laptops, just in case you happen to have one from the company and were getting suspicious. The Virus in question in the Stoned.Angelina. Currently, Medion is unsure how their systems may have gotten infected, but they are still investigating the issue. They have also taken steps to repair or replace all of the effected units.
The Stoned.Angelina virus was first reported for the Windows system in the year 1994, and there have been no cases of the virus occurring in the natural world of online computer usage since 2001. The virus was traditionally inserted onto an infected system by a floppy disk. In order to get the virus one would have to boot the system from an infected floppy disk. Most of the systems in place to protect a system from this virus considered the likelihood of getting infected with the Stoned.Angelina to be low. Symantec gives instructions for fixing your system and says the number of systems that have been infected recently to be zero.
The problem was, of course eventually fixed, when the system's native virus protection made the end users aware of the problem. The end users , once made aware of the problem, were able to fix it with a few steps. The fix was the same as it was for users in 1994, to use the fdisk /mbr command to re-write the section of the boot drive that was infected by the virus. The fix, however, is potentially dangerous to the system. If it is not executed in the correct order, with the right series of choices made, then the system could potentially be wiped entirely and render the system inoperable.
This is a lesson for all computer users and even IT security professionals. No
matter how old a threat is, and how secure you think that you are, you have to take threats to your system as seriously as we did when the threat was new. When we don't thousands of systems are at risk and the damage done to modern systems can be very real.