You may not be able to teach an old dog new tricks but those old dogs, in this case, a virus have a tendency to crop up now and then.  Microsoft is eating a bit of crow after a more than decade old virus infected some Vista based laptops sold in Danish and German retail stores.

The some 100,000 Medion laptops were infected with the Stoned.Agelina boot-sector virus and were sold in Aldi stores.  The laptops were preinstalled with Vista Home Premium and Bullguard anti-virus software.

Stoned.Agelina is a basically harmless virus that sits on the boot-sector and can spread from computer to computer.  Back when the virus was made it was typically spread via an infected floppy disk but causes no damage to the operating system or computer itself.

Still, even the fact that it’s there would bother me.  Medion does not yet know how the computers got infected.

Bullguard was quick to point out that its software was able to detect the presence of the virus on the affected systems but was unable to remove the “threat” due to the definitions for Stoned.Agelina being removed from the database.  Bullguard spokesman, Benjamin Verduign told The Register that it is common practice to remove old or outdated threats from the database for performance reasons.

The situation was quickly rectified as Bullguards development team released an automatic removal tool to deal with the Angelina virus, available at the above link.  According to information from Bullguard, the purpose of the virus is only to spread to other systems but carries no payload to the system it infects.

---

Related:

Free Vista Sunday, PCTools anti-virus free edition

Anti-virus struggles on protecting 64-bit Vista computer systems

How to fix Vista msnhook.dll error

For the price, Vista should include anti-virus protection

Free Vista Sunday, Threatfire provides additional virus protection

Entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2007 at 7:57 am under Security, Vista.  Print This Post

Read more entries by Jonathan Schlaffer.