The virus that will activate on the 22nd of August and September is called the Hare virus. It infects boot sectors and files and is Windows 95 aware. While it is in the wild, most of you probably won't encounter it because the news groups that it resides in are mainly those that offer cracked versions of commercial games for download. If your system is infected when you boot from your hard drive the virus immediately goes resident in memory because it lives in your master boot record. From there it is free to infect files. On the 22nd of August and September it will attempt to overwrite your hard drive.
I cannot stress enough that while an infection by the Hare virus would be a very serious matter, the chances of your pc becoming infected by it are extremely slim. People are making too much of a big deal about this virus, just as they did in 1992, when the Michelangelo virus was supposed to destroy the world on March 6, but only hit a couple thousand computers world-wide.
But, should your pc become infected with the Hare virus, here's how to get rid of it. Since Hare infects your master boot record, you are going to need to boot from a clean write-protected system diskette so that the virus doesn't have a chance to go TSR. You will need to have a clean version of your antivirus software on a diskette because you won't be able to run it from the hard disk. This is because with Hare in your MBR (master boot record), booting from a clean diskette will make the hard drive inaccessable to DOS, since the partition table has been replaced with the virus. Don't worry... antivirus products are equipped to deal with this situation. Mcafee's latest product, version 2.5l, can disinfect the three major versions of Hare. So can Thunderbyte antivirus. If you want a simple cure for just the hare virus, f-prot has a small program called f-hare which can detect and clean the Hare virus off your system. You can download it from:
ftp://ftp.datafellows.com/pub/f-prot/tools/f-hare15.zipUnzip the contents of this archive onto a clean diskette so it doesn't become infected. If you have a clean bootable diskette, and this little program on another diskette, you can get rid of Hare with no problem.
Remember, there is NO need to panic! I deal with viruses all the time on the job and even have a collection of about 5000 of them on my hard drive for testing purposes. If anyone has anymore questions about this or any other virus, please feel free to email me at:
bkanish@fireball.blast.netand be sure to read my article on viruses and antivirus software located at:
http://www.hicom.net/~oedipus/virus32.html