Product upgrade, 6.01D ---------------------- Improved installation procedure. The Installation of IV will now run without needing to actually change the current directory. Just type the full pathname of where IV's INSTALL program is. Daily inspection for companion virus. The companion virus verification was added to IVB, since IVB runs daily. The same routine is retained in IVscan, for operational redundancy. Keeping track of the last inspected drive. In former revisions of IV there was need to manipulate the COMSPEC variable in order to keep track of the last drive checked by IVB DAILY. Now, just issue the IVB DAILY command and the tracking record will be updated, according to the current environment settings. Only make sure to always run the DAILY check from within the same environment shell. The last improvement is especially useful to LAN administrators. The user interface in ResQdisk was improved further. The newer features were grouped in three menus, Edit (accessible by pressing ^E), Track Zero maintenance (^Z) and Analyze sector (^A). Also, the new ^B function was added. The latter will refresh the boot sector of drive C: while accessing via DOS instead of the BIOS, and is the equivalent of the SYS C: command. The ^B function is helpful in removing boot sector viruses such as Da'Boys, Boot-437, Form etc. IVinit was enhanced to automatically invoke ResQdisk when needed. From now, Most boot / mbr infectors can be handled right at startup. Improved editing features in ResQdisk. Additional editing features were added to resQdisk. The sequence ^E ^F will read a file into the sector clipboard, while ^E ^D drops the content of the displayed sector into a file. The combination ^E ^Y will decrypt an encrypted sector into the clipboard and display it on screen. The later is especially useful for the recovery of damaged hard drives, like from the Monkey virus. It is indispensable for rescuing hard drives lost to inappropriate disinfection procedures, like with fdisk/mbr, or inadequate antiviral products. The above further improve ResQdisk as the best disaster recovery and boot-antiviral utility. Improved "track 0" maintenance features. ResQdisk is used in the rescue diskette for backing up track zero of the hard disk to floppy and for restoring track zero from file to the hard drive. The "track 0" functions are now available on-line, with the visual inspection of ResQdisk, in both SeeThru modes (backup only, recovery is always done with SeeThru off). The track 0 functions are started by the ^Z keys combination, followed by ^B for backup to file or ^R for restore from file. Either the Ctrl (^) or the Alt key can now be used for the editing and the "track 0" functions. For on-line help press Alt+H while running the ResQdisk program. Making a rescue diskette for other than standard configurations. The rescue diskette in the INSTALL program was improved to simplify the preparation of a rescue diskette in configurations containing other than Stacker, DoubleSpace or Disk Manager drivers. For details read in the on-line documentation. Improved resistance to IV dedicated viruses. The first virus aimed to "kill" IV's signatures has been reported and a sample of was analyzed by NetZ. It is recommended that users change the default filename of the signatures to one of their own definition. The signature files are no longer traceable as IV's, and cannot be identified as such -- provided you don't leave them with the default name. The new signatures are fully downward compatible with the former ones, and there is no action that a user needs to take in this regard. Random signatures' filename. When installing InVircible through IVlogin, a random signatures' filename will be selected. IVLOGIN can be used for standard installation with the default parameters. The random signature filename will be implemented on first time installation only, and with the default installation parameters only (to C:\IV). Compatibility with large capacity IDE. IVTEST was corrected to ignore the dynamic boot loader of large capacity IDE disks. Revision 6.01c was compatible with only Ontrack's Disk Manager extended bios drivers (XBIOS.OVL). The new revision is also compatible with other brands, recently introduced into the market - e.g. Micro House. Troubleshooting with IV. New text was added to the on-line help in regard of troubleshooting problems with IV. There is guidance how to detect an incompatible IDE controller with your hard drive, as well as disclaimers about a couple of hardware: Promise hard drive controllers with disk cache, and certain models of Maxtor's hard drives. Further improvement for use in networked environment. IVMENU, the integrated menu shell was upgraded to avoid conflicts in certain Netware environment. January, 1995 Product upgrade, InVircible 6.01C --------------------------------- Improved performance in networked environment: Revision 6.01C has further improvements for the operation of InVircible in the networked environment. All the scanning modules; IVB, IVscan and IVX were revised to avoid Novell's Netware files. The verification of Netware files under DOS created errors because of the special attributes of Netware's system files. IV's current revision avoids these files. Updated manual: The use of IV in network environment, as well as the strategy of how to disinfect the server and network are covered in a new appendix, in the manual text. Automatic IV version upgrades in network: IVLOGIN can now be used for both the automatic installation of InVircible to workstations in a networked environment, as well as the upgrading of an older IV version to a newer one. IVLOGIN checks whether its own version is newer than the current one installed on the hard drive. An older version will be automatically replaced by a new one, by just invoking IVLOGIN. It is recommended that the IVLOGIN command should always be included in the users login script, in networks. Improved piggybacking detection: Revision 6.01C has higher sensitivity of piggybacking detection. The detection threshold has been lowered to detect piggybacking within few affected files. The improved sensitivity has no effect on speed since the loss in speed was compensated for with a better search algorithm. New "copy and paste" functions in ResQdisk: It is an advantage to have editing capability of the master and boot sectors of the hard disk. ResQdisk can now copy the content of a displayed sector to the clipboard, by the ^E ^R sequence, then paste it elsewhere by pressing ^E ^W. The copy and paste functions are useful to recover from mbr and boot sector viruses, that relocate the original sector elsewhere, usually on track 0. The copying and pasting of the original sector can be done under the visual control of ResQdisk. The new functions can be used to store copies of the critical sectors (mbr and boot sectors) in the unused section of track 0, usually from sector 2 to the last sector on the track. Avoid using sector 3 (used by Monkey), 7 (Stoned, Michelangelo), 8 (used by Disk Manager - not a virus), 17 (B1-NYB), 13 (NewBug) and the last sector (Quox and a few others). December 1994 Product upgrade, InVircible 6.01B --------------------------------- Installation of InVircible on networked PC: Revision 6.01B has an additional file, IVLOGIN.EXE. As its name implies, its use is from the user login script in networks. When a workstation connects to the network, IVLOGIN verifies whether it has a hard drive, and if InVircible is installed on that disk. If not, INSTALL/FAST is invoked to install IV to the hard disk. The LAN administrator is required to install IV to the server and add the IVLOGIN command to the user login script. The rest is done automatically. IVB upgrade: Some lame viruses affect *.SYS and *.OVL files, if they have an executable structure (usually an EXE one). Thus, *.SYS and *.OVL files were added under IVB's coverture. These files are now secured by IVB, and can be recovered, in case they get infected. ResQdisk upgrades: There were disk configurations that ResQdisk didn't recognize properly. These were found mostly on Compaq models, having a special partition dedicated to proprietary diagnostics, coming first, before the DOS active partition. ResQdisk was upgraded to accommodate for these configurations too. In addition, ResQdisk had a few fixes to assure its proper functioning with the new mode 3 and 4 IDE standards, EIDE as well as with large capacity SCSI drives. This now covers all hard disk types used in personal computers. Install upgrades: The French version of InVircible configures now the rescue diskette to start with a French keyboard. Install also takes care to REM out the Thunderbyte TSR in the autoexec, at the installation of IV. The TB TSR intercept IV initialization checks and may crash the system. Also, Install will now install the IV registration key to hard drives having the Compaq configuration (see ResQdisk, above). User interface updates. Both IVB and IVSCAN command line syntax has been improved. The [d:] argument, where d represents a drive letter, will now start the program from the drive's root, instead of the current directory. For the default directory just don't give any drive argument.