Lamer Exterminator

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Lamer Exterminator is a computer virus created for the Commodore Amiga. It was first detected in Germany in October 1989. It is a boot sector virus.

It is notable as the first virus known to be defensive. It hooks into the system in such a way that examining a bootblock will return a normal result and upon replicating will also encrypt itself.

[edit] Symptoms

Over-writes the bootblock
Remains RAM resident (allocating 1024 bytes and identifying itself: 'The LAMER Exterminator !!!')
Hooks into the system (remaining reset-resident)
Destroys media blocks by overwriting them 84 times with the string 'LAMER!', causing read/write errors on affected storage media. This causes filesystem corruption and data loss, which is unrecoverable.

[edit] Variants

The Lamer Exterminator spawned many variants that were created by different programmers.

There is folklore about Amiga viruses, such as a particular Lamer Exterminator strain being able to write to a write protected disk. However, no such Amiga virus can exist since the write protection is not controllable via software. Similar tales include that a virus that would remain in the system even if one powered off the computer; this particular virus was claimed to store itself to the battery backed clock of the computer. This wasn't the case, since the clock memory was not executable and far too small to contain a functioning virus regardless. All RAM-resident Amiga viruses can be purged from memory by powering off the system. However it should be noted that there exist viruses (other than lamer exterminator) that possibly can physically damage the Amiga floppy disk drive by forcing the step motor to drive the read/write head(s) above or below the maximum range to drive it out of alignment.