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I thought the same. I wonder how many poor people's lives were really soured by this action. As a kid I didn't have much money and would have been devastated to have my software (especially the legit software) destroyed by these actions.
I don't think it was a lie. It was for the challenge, and then once people started disinfecting the virus, the new challenge became to hide it even more. Eventually it turned malicious.
I was a newbie IT guy in a hospital in the mid 90s. We got hit with the one half virus in Windows for Workgroups 3.11. It was devastating. The pc’s would try and boot and got the message “dis is one half” and couldn’t do anything else. All you could do was scrub the machine. It brought an 8 floor hospital to its knees. Crazy times for sure. Do a search for that virus. It was crazy.
Ah the 90's, when hackers in their mom's basement would often include ebonics in the virus name/message to seem more edgy. Like you're being hacked by some gangsta rap group. The "Da Boyz" virus comes to mind... 🤣
Its actually a slovakian made virus, also called OneHalf, SlovakBomber or even "Košický mor" literally meaning The Plague of Košice, which is a city in the eastern part of Slovakia, probably originating from the local University there.
"Write protection" One of the things I really, really miss from the old days. Every flash device should have a write protect switch, including firmware!
Around '91 my friend had an Amiga. We would copy disks sent to us from European hacker groups. His Amiga randomly started printing BEER on the screen in a variety of fonts and colors upon booting up. We would have to reboot when that happened. It wasn't every boot, just sometimes. We suspected it came from a demo disk, probably the ACID demo.
ACID demo by Ash & Dave? With the Humanoid Stakker song? I know there was another one and maybe thats the one you talk about. I know of the ACID demo on C64 from Ash & Dave. We took like 20 C64's and started that demo at the same time. Crazy times as teenagers lol. I knew the biggest swapper where i am at that time (also Europe). I got every game day 1. Even games that werent finished. That sucked because they were bug ridden or you couldnt finish them. 😂
I first encountered this Amiga virus in the late 1980s. I was working on Amiga Computing magazine in the UK, and saw it on a friend's Amiga. I was intrigued, I'd never heard of a virus before, so as a journalist I tried to sell the story. I offered it to Popular Computing Weekly and The Guardian. Jack Schofield, the Guardian Tech editor was skeptical and said he'd only run it if Pop Comp, did. They didn't so Jack demurred. The next week Pop Comp ran my story on the front page, so Jack took the story. I believe that it was the first ever story on computer viruses to appear in a British national newspaper.
There's absolutely no reason to think it was SCA to doing that. In fact, anyone could trivially do that with a hex editor if you knew what you're doing.
Still makes it pretty naïve to think that if you yourself share some 'no-harm' virus, people wouldn't catch on and go use it as example to do harm... Different times I guess. Thought people nowadays aren't taking tech too serious...
I loved how the virus killer back then only knew a hand full of viruses. but made those feel special. The program had a fancy graphical UI and each virus when detected had its own graphical representation with a nice hand drawn pixel art where the artist imagined some kind of organic virus in digital form. It was a challenge among us to find and trade new viruses to "unlock" all the images the virus killer had to offer.
Funny story: the first time I saw the Your Amiga is Alive message was like right after I'd seen Pulse and Maximum Overdrive, 2 horror movies about machines coming alive and killing people. Needless to say, I was pretty much terrified out of my then 9 year old mind.
In the Sega Genesis game "Red Zone" there is a scene where your character inserts a virus into a computer system. The words "Something wonderful has happened" show as an easter egg and I've always wondered what that meant. It could be a reference to this virus. ruclips.net/video/FZKsQ09qOk4/видео.htmlsi=VmXNbpQpcqmUkp2e&t=546 at 9:06
@@LucasCunhaRocha Yeah, it's a showcase of what genuinely top-tier programmers could do with the MD/Gen. And it's actually a pretty good game, too, not just a glorified tech demo.
Hey MVG, I didn't grow up with the Amiga, but I think there's a lot of people who want to know more abour its games. It'd be nice if you made a video of the better games on the system and current emulators to enjoy them. Cheers!
I also never grew up with the Amiga. But thanks to LGR's videos on the Amiga 500 and Fire & Ice. It made me get Amiga Forever and I couldn't be any more grateful
My first computer virus was the green worm. Caught it off of a mouse driver disc. I then became obsessed with them and started collecting. By the time I was done, I had a couple megabytes worth of them. This was back when 40MB harddrives were considered large.
I remember getting a virus from Lemmings too. From what I understood, it was called the LAMER virus, as it wrote "LAMER" to three (I think it was three) random places on any disc put in. Bad data and disks then followed. I never got the something wonderful message. I'm glad that this was (well before) I got a hard drive!
I remember having this exact sca virus, im getting nostalgia about it now 😂 I remember removing the virus with my program disk simply called virus killer, i still have the same program disk today. Thank you MVG for the insight to this, i never knew i would be so interested about a virus i only wanted to get rid of back in the day 👍
Awesome video as always. Those were the days. "Oh no my Amiga has a virus!" Turns Amiga off. Counts to 10. Turns Amiga on again. "All fixed!" Commercial games (legally purchased) would remain write protected unless they required to write to the disk for the scoreboard for example, and then it was optional. I do recall losing a couple to a virus but that was my own silly fault for not leaving write protection on. I do also recall the "Virus Killer" software that tried to repair boot sectors but never did really.
I got my Amiga 500 in 1988. It came with Test Drive, Backlash and Return to Atlantis. Return to Atlantis needed a blank floppy disk to write save data to so I bought one (for £2.50!) from my local computer shop and it came up with a 'not a dos disk' error. I tried three other disks and they all did the same. The shop investigated and found that the blanks were all infected with the SCA virus. Luckily the original disks all had their write protect on so they were OK.
In the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive game Red Zone, one of the first missions is to infect an enemy base with a virus program. When you do, the computer in the game will read the message "Something wonderful has happened" followed by critical system failure. Now, whether this is a Short Circuit reference, or a reference to this Amiga virus, well, I truly can't say, but, considering it's a virus, well...
If they didn't write the virus to destroy software then why did they update it when someone came up with an antivirus. They clearly had malicious intentions
Exactly. And worst of all is people putting them on a pedestal and even this video treats them as legends in a not negative way which is morally questionable.
@@ricardolmendes That's a massive issue with the tech scene in general. Blatant sociopaths who do nothing but make things worse are put on an undeserved pedestal by people blinded by the hype. It directly leads to this dystopian cesspool the scene has ended up being.
@@felixdaniels37 A friend of mine went to copy parties back then. From reading the bravado scroll texts most of them put in their crack intros, he was expecting to meet some really, really tough guys. Of course, all he ever met was practically geeks with greasy hair, pimples and huge spectacles who'd never had a girlfriend.
He never updated it. All subsequent versions were written by copycats. All he did was write the anti-virus, which even fixed some newer versions he didn't make. He commented on this video explaining the situation. Making the first bootblock virus just got him in the spotlight. He's known for a lot of great work. It wasn't malicious but naïve. Didn't expect it to spread beyond a small circle, nor account for breaking DRM and file systems that didn't exist yet. @bigredracingteam9642 Did your friend expect a room full of bodybuilders or athletes at an 80's computer party? I don't think your friend is very smart. @@felixdaniels37 People in tech are celebrated for engineering feats that take real talent or insight. Intro/demo scene found many breakthroughs in stuff like graphics, memory handling, and compression that makes it into popular game engines, 3D software, audio tools, file formats and much more. But sure, you can mock the 'sociopaths' with their hair, pimples, glasses and lack of female while enjoying those smartphones, video games and digital music. Seriously... who comes to a tech video on a tech channel and complains about 'geeks' and the tech scene?
Hey MVG, thanks for this amazing video! I grew up loading cracked software on my C64/Amiga which we swapped at school. Always was fascinated by those cracktros and demos. I love content and insights of the good ol' C64/Amiga hacking and cracking scene, especially in-depth videos as this one. I Please keep those coming! Thanks, Chris
I really love to think back of this time. Later those copy/ scene parties of which I sadly only went to a couple. Still love to fire up my commodores and take a trip down memory lane watching old cracktros and demos ❤
@@DarkonFullPower or maybe they got the sequence of events mixed up. They bypassed security only BEFORE they realized their damage, not AFTER. A lot of comments got this information wrong or have misunderstood.
This is why open source is so great. You can read the source and check for malicious code before running it. Granted, not everyone is capable, nor has the time, nor the motivation, and even that isn't a perfect solution, but the important thing is that it *allows* for you to check it. Of course, it still can't prevent people from pointing out that your non sequitur doesn't apply to the content of a video because it was a boot sector virus on the disk, but I'll say it anyway.
Another example of: I did this thing with no intent to do harm… how could I know the damage it would do!! Sometimes, people need to slow down and think of the repercussions of their behaviour BEFORE they do it. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should
I don't think I ever had the SCA virus, but I remember the name because virus killers would generally advertise a list of the viruses they recognised, and SCA always appeared on those lists. The virus I remember being particularly common was "lamer exterminator" which was unfortunately very aggressive and destructive.
I never got any viruses from pirated disks, but did come across some Workbench hacks i.e. Lemmings, Window washer, June Bug, Fleas or little black dots randomly using objects to climb etc... and little white men that could walk around on the Workbench screen and using icons to climb and fall off from, to name a few.
Razor 1911? Damn, they were active that long ago in the Amiga era? I am too young to be in that era so I did not realize. I respected them but now this adds more. That is awesome. I thought they were more recent
CHW! The signature. Spent some time disassembling that boot block . They had a disassembler/debugger too, called ROMcrack, it used the same method of the virus to stay resident and survive the reset, was nice
Back in the days i had this very peculiar virus-killer that whould recognize ONLY the SCA pattern on disk, replace it with a standard dos boot-sector and play a sample of Queen's "we are the champions"when succeeded. Anyone remembers it?
I'd say it's more a legitimacy phrase. If I have a "legit copy" I dumped myself, then I know it will be the same as my "official copy." A pirated copy would therefore mean I have no clue if the game is 1:1 perfect or if something is inconsistent for whatever reason, and I have no way to check the original dump source.
Something similar happened to me when we got our first PC in 1990. I went to school excited to talk to my friends who also had a computer. They'd bring me some games. Gave me some disks a few days later, took them home, and presto: my introduction to computer viruses with the Form.exe virus (boot sector virus). This was well before antivirus software so we had to unplug and take the computer back to the guy who sold it to us because we knew almost nothing about them (the floppy drive clicking and thumping away madly in this case and the computer eventually not booting up). Learned not to just stick any old disk into the floppy drive. Thanks for the great video!
First virus I ever saw was on mom’s work computer with windows 3.1. It was a floppy passed around the office with a custom screen saver. It’s interesting how they managed to spread without internet and how little people knew about viruses. It was common to just insert and run and unknown floppy without any kind of protection. I remember that I was scared of floppy discs as a kid thinking they all had viruses.
Remember kids, the publishers need you to max out your parents' credit cards on the game. Don't disappoint them, you can use the gambling mechanics disguised as random loot to achieve this quickly. Good luck.
The primary reason i learned assembler back in the early 90s was to write TSRs and some basic replicating viruses on PC. I just used to replicate and flash up messages, just to see how many of my mates noticed when i handed out disks. You could get virus source off BBS's and then learn how they worked back in the day. These days I think I'm doing well when a i get Golang bin down to a few MB but then i think back to the time you could literally hand code a TSR in about 15 mins on-the-fly using the standard tools in DOS, let alone a full assembler suite.
Does anyone remember a program on the Amiga called "Virus Construction Set" or something along those lines? It was a program that could extract the virus from the bootblock and store it in a local database. You could then boot up VCS and select a virus you wanted to install onto the disk. Some of the viruses could be installed in parallel, meaning the disk could have had more than one virus on it. Back then, we had fun installing viruses on a friends system thinking nothing of it. I would never dream of doing such things today.
I never had it, but I heard about it. I did have a disc that booted into a menu that let you choose 4 viruses to install. I never clicked, I had a friend that was bugged by the Sadam-virus so I knew this could have serious consequences.
I had that, it was a bunch of bootblock virii stored as files, you select the virus, and that file was written out as a bootblock to a disk. Also, you could modify some of the virii, but even modified ones where detected by the anti-virus tools of the time as vcs based virii.
I wrote a Trojan or botnet as a exercise, it connected to an IRC channel where I could send commands to them and accidentally released it through the file sharing platform direct connect. It infected several hundred computers but it did nothing by default and had no ability to be destructive to the host. Luckily I included the ability to 'dissolve' the trojan by deleting itself and the startup methods which I did and never used any of the features of the trojan which mainly was for DDoS attacks.
OMG! I had that same virus on my A500! I haven’t seen that screen in almost forty years. I always figured I brought it home from SMAUG the Southern Maine Amiga Users Group where we traded disks a lot.
Yeah, I remember this. My first computer virus infection. And it did ruin some of my track loader games. Shortly afterwards people started talking about scary (and impossible) viruses that could "infect" the RTC on some memory expansion cards, lol!
Had to take our computer to the guy that sold it to us as we were clueless at that point about computers besides how to run programs. It WAS terrifying to have an expensive machine my parents bought become a brick on the desk.
I remember having had two viruses on the Amiga but I don't remember the name. One was more of a 'fun' virus that melted the workbench, I got rid of it quickly with an antivirus disc. It didn't seem to do any damage apart from locking up you Amiga. The other one was on an infected copy of Oktalyzer. It ruined all my oktalyzer modules and some data on other discs too. I remember that it renamed the files as well. At one point a had a disc with a small menu on which you could choose to install 4 viruses. Never used it. The last virus I had was only last years. A trojan for windows that was hidden on a linux distribution (Slax). It quickly spread on all my HD's but I managed to get it off with some boot disc (defender couldn't manage it).
@bigredracingteam9642 Indeed! That's the one! It had 8 channels. I also remember that the sample editor was rather good. I also remember one of the demosongs as it sounded rather 'industrial'. But that might be a broken memory 😆.
This came on on background auto play for me after watching your Shadow of the Beast video, and my first thought was “Awesome, MVG’s done a deep dive video on Lemmings!”
Huh, thankfully here in the US I didn't know anyone else with an Amiga. So we had no way of sharing floppies. I didn't learn about viruses until later.
I myself inadvertently wrote a virus for the Amiga. I had created a security program to protect my floppies, but somewhere I had made a mistake and it unintentionally infected other floppies. Fortunately, it was not widespread and I was still able to stop it from doing further harm.
The true moral of the story is that DRM is worse than a virus. Try installing a Windows XP game with Starforce and look what happens to a Windows 10 bootable device.
Oh yes. Just a few days ago I ripped disks to play an old game on my Steam Deck and it refused to start with an error message it couldn't find a legit copy of Windows 95, 98 or XP. No surprise there since it was SteamOS and Proton. So I needed to find a No CD Patch anyway which wasn't easy. It's awful how difficult things are made for legitimate customers all in the name of combating piracy, but ultimately pirates end up with the better experience
@Thornskade That reminds me. Though subtle due to being an industrial standard at the time, requiring a disk to be inserted was also DRM! And yes, it can make things difficult these days. Thank God for GoG!
Hey MVG just letting you know there is a pretty bad humming sound in the background on some parts of the video. Almost sounds like a cable thats not entirely plugged in or something similar.
As a kid I remember that virus. Although we didn't have a HD on the Amiga at the time and one of our biggest troubleshooting steps was to turn the computer off and on. So it never infected any other disks.
Am trying hard to imagine a scenario where a virus would have hit me, an average A1200 user: I didn't have a hard disk, my floppy disks had write protection notch set... I am so glad this missed me. And yeah, over the 42 years I have been computing, I have had my fair share of destructive viruses, not being condescending.
I had something similar happen to my Amiga in the early 90s. It even knackered my friend's copy of Falcon, that I'd borrowed from him. In my case, the little critter responsible was Byte Bandit.
I remember we had a very handy little boot block utility. It booted up in one second, It was a virus checker and cleaner, you could copy it to any normal floppy boot block. It also let you switch between PAL or NTSC and choose if memory expansion was Fast or Chip RAM. I had it on all my utility disks and any games that needed PAL or chip RAM.
I'm a bit too young to have known this part of the computers history (the first computer I used was a Windows 98), so it was interesting to learn about that. Thanks for the video!
Side note: Later Amiga viruses stored the original boot sector(s) to a free block on the disk. Using a disk editor you could repair the disks, if you knew that to look for.
Dad got me a Commadore Amiga 500 about 89. Used to bring home a list of games and then come home with the ones I selected a couple days later. I still pirate the majority of the games I play @ 43
I had an Amiga Virus back around the mid 90s on my Amiga 500. It wasn't this one, but it eventually managed to corrupt my AmigaBasic disk and I was so upset I cried. Good times.
I give you Credit Dude! I only knew of Macintosh Computers when I went to School and when I got home my Parent's had the Windows 3.1 which later got Upgraded to Windows 95 I never owned a Amiga Computer!
If you had the original Commodore 1MB RAM expansion that contained a battery to mantain the clock settings, you were in trouble because, even if you turned off the Amiga, some viruses still remained in memory thanks to that battery. Viruses were so common back in the days but you can still find them today in some disk images from tosec.
That was a lie, all the battery was for was the clock. But an Amiga does keep stuff in ram for a 'while' even turned off, if you just turned it off and back on, the virii could stay in ram, I was told to wait at least 30 seconds to clear the ram, Even on my 1200 I still have, if it crashes badly enough, with it having 32mb ram, if you turn it back on after a bad crash, it will just either crash or guru straight away.
Stoned is the only PC virus I ever got hit with. After that, I paid attention to what I was running, that's for sure. I mean, we couldn't have me AND the PC being stoned all the time ...
I immediately thought the line was a reference to the movie 2010, with it's enigmatic and eerie repetition of " what will happen? Something wonderful."; but touche, Mr. Johnny 5.
the first amiga virus i encountered was a disk validator virus. iirc the saddam virus? it infected/replaced the disk validator - a system program on standard amiga disks. but there where anti virus software available at that time, so not much harm was done. later i installed kickstart 2.05 where the diskvalidator was moved to rom (no more diskvalidator on disk). solved the problem eventually.
As a causal Amiga user I never came across this back in the day. Very interesting - and now I know to be on the lookout for this if I get back into the Amiga.
The first time I saw a virus running on my Amiga I was like, "Cool!" because it was so stylish. A two-day virus-scanning marathon later with seemingly endless streams of files being checked on two different machines and I didn't think it was so cool anymore. Note: The Amiga can bypass the write-protection notch.
I ran a BBS bac k in those days... before the internet and cable modems turned up.. some virus's back then were quite sophisticated, the Lamer Exterminator virus used the scanline position of the rastered pixel to encrypt itself in memory
I don't remember if I ever had the SCA virus, but I did have a commercial copy (factory sealed) of Strip Poker that came with a virus on it. Fortunately, the virus checker program I had on my Amiga at the time had already been updated for that particular virus, so it was easy to remove it.
"most of us owned Amigas, PCs at that time were unaffordable to most students unless you had rich parents" The notion in the retro community that PCs were always far more expensive than Commodore products is a myth that can easily be disproven by checking prices published in computer magazines of that era. In 1987 the Amiga 500 launched for US$699 where as in the same year a turbo XT clone could be bought for US$375-425. By 1991 the Amiga had dropped in price but so had PCs and for the same price as a Amiga 500 you could get a 16mhz 286 clone. When you factor in the price of adding a hard drive and monitor, the PC actually comes out to be far cheaper. As a result Amiga's tended to be owned by wealthier families where as by 1991 PCs had replaced the c64 as the budget option for low income families in Australia. I speak of this as someone who grew up in a working class area in Australia and who worked part-time throughout high school in a computer store. My family and most the other computer focused students in my schools ended up with PCs because Amigas were simply too expensive for most of us.
Amazing video as always! While I knew about the existence of this virus, hearing this story from someone who was actually an Amiga user and encountered it in the wild like that is fascinating! Plus I didn't know that much about SCA as a group. I generally love it whenever you talk about the Amiga or the demo scene, so this was a real treat. Small correction though: at 4:30 you call Brain the first virus to make its way to home computers. It's not an entirely accurate way of phrasing it; it was indeed the first known *IBM PC* virus. However, there were earlier examples of viruses for other microcomputers, notably the Apple II. The most common consensus is that Elk Cloner from 1982 is the first home computer virus. Still, Brain can be, in a way, considered the first home computer virus of renown, so I get wanting to talk about that particular example. It's a more apt comparison to the SCA virus, anyways. Small nitpick but hey, early computer viruses are kinda my area of study, so I can't help but point it out. Anyways, can't wait for the next video! Huge fan of what you do here.
It’s mind blowing how virusses and the digital spreading of those virusses already dates back to the 1980’s. Who had ever throught that despite not many people did had a computer, that there were even hackers aound there back then.
@0:26 My favourite Amiga Cracktro was/is Chuck Rock II - Anthrox. Not sure if it was a virus or not back in the day. but i had Mc Donald land game and Ctrl A A would not reset the game and it would always come back.
"Something wonderful has happened" reminds me of the spooky scene in 2010 (the sequel to 2001) where Dave Bowman appears on his wife's TV. Very underrated film by the way
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There seems to be a strong buzzing in the background of the video. Interference caught on the mic, maybe?
MVG, You got some "Download this Malware now" Scare Tactic Issues... Just... Stop with the Act!!!
Disappointing to see that you’re doing these ad reads, but I understand that the additional funding can go a long way.
WT FTW MÄÄN!
@@hamtaro126 Not malware, but there is Russian bias... Quite a bit of it.
"I never wanted to destroy any software." Updating it to defeat protections and mitigations sure puts the lie to that line.
I thought the same. I wonder how many poor people's lives were really soured by this action. As a kid I didn't have much money and would have been devastated to have my software (especially the legit software) destroyed by these actions.
“I never meant to hurt anyone”
“No one ever does, SCA”
Yeah, that part really sticks out.
im sure the cinese government didnt want to hurt anyone with thier covid virus either.
I don't think it was a lie. It was for the challenge, and then once people started disinfecting the virus, the new challenge became to hide it even more. Eventually it turned malicious.
I was a newbie IT guy in a hospital in the mid 90s. We got hit with the one half virus in Windows for Workgroups 3.11. It was devastating. The pc’s would try and boot and got the message “dis is one half” and couldn’t do anything else. All you could do was scrub the machine. It brought an 8 floor hospital to its knees. Crazy times for sure. Do a search for that virus. It was crazy.
Should we class that as attempted murder? It strikes me as attempted murder.
2/2 Indeed, attempted _mass murder._
Ah the 90's, when hackers in their mom's basement would often include ebonics in the virus name/message to seem more edgy. Like you're being hacked by some gangsta rap group.
The "Da Boyz" virus comes to mind...
🤣
Its actually a slovakian made virus, also called OneHalf, SlovakBomber or even "Košický mor" literally meaning The Plague of Košice, which is a city in the eastern part of Slovakia, probably originating from the local University there.
"Write protection"
One of the things I really, really miss from the old days. Every flash device should have a write protect switch, including firmware!
Around '91 my friend had an Amiga. We would copy disks sent to us from European hacker groups. His Amiga randomly started printing BEER on the screen in a variety of fonts and colors upon booting up. We would have to reboot when that happened. It wasn't every boot, just sometimes. We suspected it came from a demo disk, probably the ACID demo.
That's fucking hilarious LMAO
You have the talking Homer beer opener virus, then
@ARandomTrout356 I have VHS recordings of a bunch of old Amiga demos, but never captured the Beer screen.
ACID demo by Ash & Dave? With the Humanoid Stakker song? I know there was another one and maybe thats the one you talk about. I know of the ACID demo on C64 from Ash & Dave. We took like 20 C64's and started that demo at the same time. Crazy times as teenagers lol. I knew the biggest swapper where i am at that time (also Europe). I got every game day 1. Even games that werent finished. That sucked because they were bug ridden or you couldnt finish them. 😂
@@AlexArt2001 It was this one... ruclips.net/video/qeZq1p5nflw/видео.html
I first encountered this Amiga virus in the late 1980s. I was working on Amiga Computing magazine in the UK, and saw it on a friend's Amiga. I was intrigued, I'd never heard of a virus before, so as a journalist I tried to sell the story. I offered it to Popular Computing Weekly and The Guardian. Jack Schofield, the Guardian Tech editor was skeptical and said he'd only run it if Pop Comp, did. They didn't so Jack demurred. The next week Pop Comp ran my story on the front page, so Jack took the story. I believe that it was the first ever story on computer viruses to appear in a British national newspaper.
This is so interesting - essentially history. Do you have any means to read these articles currently?
"It was never meant to cause harm" and I call that entirely BS. Constantly updating the virus so it can avoid detection, how's that NOT malicious?
Exactly!!! What the hell man?!
There's absolutely no reason to think it was SCA to doing that. In fact, anyone could trivially do that with a hex editor if you knew what you're doing.
even if sca did so. i think it was just a game to them. anti virus would improve, they would use another way in.
The updates were done by others, there were dozens of variations. Some changed only the text, others made it more resilient.
Still makes it pretty naïve to think that if you yourself share some 'no-harm' virus, people wouldn't catch on and go use it as example to do harm... Different times I guess. Thought people nowadays aren't taking tech too serious...
When i got an amiga in 1989, a friend told me never to leave disks write enabled.
I loved how the virus killer back then only knew a hand full of viruses. but made those feel special. The program had a fancy graphical UI and each virus when detected had its own graphical representation with a nice hand drawn pixel art where the artist imagined some kind of organic virus in digital form. It was a challenge among us to find and trade new viruses to "unlock" all the images the virus killer had to offer.
9:08 "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."
Last time I used that quote it was accompanying a photo of some butterscotch flavored pork rinds I found in Walmart.
Funny story: the first time I saw the Your Amiga is Alive message was like right after I'd seen Pulse and Maximum Overdrive, 2 horror movies about machines coming alive and killing people. Needless to say, I was pretty much terrified out of my then 9 year old mind.
In the Sega Genesis game "Red Zone" there is a scene where your character inserts a virus into a computer system. The words "Something wonderful has happened" show as an easter egg and I've always wondered what that meant. It could be a reference to this virus. ruclips.net/video/FZKsQ09qOk4/видео.htmlsi=VmXNbpQpcqmUkp2e&t=546 at 9:06
holy shit, I never heard of this game, looks really cool, reminded me of "take no prisoners"
@@LucasCunhaRocha Yeah, it's a showcase of what genuinely top-tier programmers could do with the MD/Gen. And it's actually a pretty good game, too, not just a glorified tech demo.
Actually, most of the developers (Zyrinx) for the game consisted on people that were active on the Amiga scene back in the late 80s and early 90s.
I'm sure the developers would've been aware; considering how demoscene-y Red Zone is.
I remember getting the virus in New Zealand circa 1991, It was real spooky I thought the Amiga had come to life!
"I didn't mean to destroy any software so I just made my program erase data on disks."
A coaster.
A floppy is too light to become paperweight.
Hey MVG, I didn't grow up with the Amiga, but I think there's a lot of people who want to know more abour its games. It'd be nice if you made a video of the better games on the system and current emulators to enjoy them. Cheers!
Good idea I’ll put it on the list
I'd love to see it. I'm too young to have been in the amiga craze and I'd love to see some cool games
I also never grew up with the Amiga. But thanks to LGR's videos on the Amiga 500 and Fire & Ice. It made me get Amiga Forever and I couldn't be any more grateful
I remember how amiga games had a certain look about their design that just gives away that they are amiga games, even when ported to consoles.
@@ModernVintageGamer please do, love your retro videos
11:00 "no it doesn't stand for the other thing" lol, almost missed that
My first computer virus was the green worm. Caught it off of a mouse driver disc. I then became obsessed with them and started collecting. By the time I was done, I had a couple megabytes worth of them. This was back when 40MB harddrives were considered large.
"nouse driver" bwahahah.
Collecting what? Mouse driver discs?
I remember getting a virus from Lemmings too. From what I understood, it was called the LAMER virus, as it wrote "LAMER" to three (I think it was three) random places on any disc put in. Bad data and disks then followed. I never got the something wonderful message.
I'm glad that this was (well before) I got a hard drive!
Sorry about that
That was the Lamer Exterminator. Something I'm pretty sure I never got.. BSG9 was my most common Amiga virus back in the day.
"Number 5 is alive" now I know where that quote came from. I found it in Astro's Playroom when I found the PS5 artifact 😂
Damn, you're making me feel old lol
I remember having this exact sca virus, im getting nostalgia about it now 😂
I remember removing the virus with my program disk simply called virus killer, i still have the same program disk today.
Thank you MVG for the insight to this, i never knew i would be so interested about a virus i only wanted to get rid of back in the day 👍
Awesome video as always.
Those were the days. "Oh no my Amiga has a virus!"
Turns Amiga off. Counts to 10. Turns Amiga on again.
"All fixed!"
Commercial games (legally purchased) would remain write protected unless they required to write to the disk for the scoreboard for example, and then it was optional.
I do recall losing a couple to a virus but that was my own silly fault for not leaving write protection on.
I do also recall the "Virus Killer" software that tried to repair boot sectors but never did really.
I got my Amiga 500 in 1988. It came with Test Drive, Backlash and Return to Atlantis. Return to Atlantis needed a blank floppy disk to write save data to so I bought one (for £2.50!) from my local computer shop and it came up with a 'not a dos disk' error. I tried three other disks and they all did the same. The shop investigated and found that the blanks were all infected with the SCA virus. Luckily the original disks all had their write protect on so they were OK.
In the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive game Red Zone, one of the first missions is to infect an enemy base with a virus program. When you do, the computer in the game will read the message "Something wonderful has happened" followed by critical system failure. Now, whether this is a Short Circuit reference, or a reference to this Amiga virus, well, I truly can't say, but, considering it's a virus, well...
Red Zone is definitely a demoscene kind of production, it wouldn't surprise me if the devs were aware of SCA.
If they didn't write the virus to destroy software then why did they update it when someone came up with an antivirus. They clearly had malicious intentions
Exactly. And worst of all is people putting them on a pedestal and even this video treats them as legends in a not negative way which is morally questionable.
They’re assholes.
@@ricardolmendes
That's a massive issue with the tech scene in general. Blatant sociopaths who do nothing but make things worse are put on an undeserved pedestal by people blinded by the hype. It directly leads to this dystopian cesspool the scene has ended up being.
@@felixdaniels37 A friend of mine went to copy parties back then. From reading the bravado scroll texts most of them put in their crack intros, he was expecting to meet some really, really tough guys. Of course, all he ever met was practically geeks with greasy hair, pimples and huge spectacles who'd never had a girlfriend.
He never updated it. All subsequent versions were written by copycats. All he did was write the anti-virus, which even fixed some newer versions he didn't make. He commented on this video explaining the situation.
Making the first bootblock virus just got him in the spotlight. He's known for a lot of great work. It wasn't malicious but naïve. Didn't expect it to spread beyond a small circle, nor account for breaking DRM and file systems that didn't exist yet.
@bigredracingteam9642
Did your friend expect a room full of bodybuilders or athletes at an 80's computer party? I don't think your friend is very smart.
@@felixdaniels37
People in tech are celebrated for engineering feats that take real talent or insight. Intro/demo scene found many breakthroughs in stuff like graphics, memory handling, and compression that makes it into popular game engines, 3D software, audio tools, file formats and much more.
But sure, you can mock the 'sociopaths' with their hair, pimples, glasses and lack of female while enjoying those smartphones, video games and digital music.
Seriously... who comes to a tech video on a tech channel and complains about 'geeks' and the tech scene?
Hey MVG, thanks for this amazing video! I grew up loading cracked software on my C64/Amiga which we swapped at school. Always was fascinated by those cracktros and demos. I love content and insights of the good ol' C64/Amiga hacking and cracking scene, especially in-depth videos as this one. I Please keep those coming! Thanks, Chris
Those were the days!
I really love to think back of this time. Later those copy/ scene parties of which I sadly only went to a couple. Still love to fire up my commodores and take a trip down memory lane watching old cracktros and demos ❤
10:15 How are they going to claim it wasn't malicious, if they were actively updating it to bypass security?
Simple.
They lied.
@@DarkonFullPower or maybe they got the sequence of events mixed up. They bypassed security only BEFORE they realized their damage, not AFTER. A lot of comments got this information wrong or have misunderstood.
The author is saying others were updating the virus, not him.
This is why open source is so great. You can read the source and check for malicious code before running it. Granted, not everyone is capable, nor has the time, nor the motivation, and even that isn't a perfect solution, but the important thing is that it *allows* for you to check it. Of course, it still can't prevent people from pointing out that your non sequitur doesn't apply to the content of a video because it was a boot sector virus on the disk, but I'll say it anyway.
Another example of: I did this thing with no intent to do harm… how could I know the damage it would do!!
Sometimes, people need to slow down and think of the repercussions of their behaviour BEFORE they do it.
Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should
I don't think I ever had the SCA virus, but I remember the name because virus killers would generally advertise a list of the viruses they recognised, and SCA always appeared on those lists. The virus I remember being particularly common was "lamer exterminator" which was unfortunately very aggressive and destructive.
I never got any viruses from pirated disks, but did come across some Workbench hacks i.e. Lemmings, Window washer, June Bug, Fleas or little black dots randomly using objects to climb etc... and little white men that could walk around on the Workbench screen and using icons to climb and fall off from, to name a few.
Razor 1911? Damn, they were active that long ago in the Amiga era? I am too young to be in that era so I did not realize. I respected them but now this adds more. That is awesome. I thought they were more recent
yes they're active from 1911, hence the name
They cracked the enigma code.
@@halucinujte You actually have to descend directly from at least three Razor 1911 members to join the group!
@@halucinujte 1911 is because load of groups had 666 in their name back on the c64.. 1911 is 777 in hexadecimal so 1 better in every way.
CHW! The signature. Spent some time disassembling that boot block . They had a disassembler/debugger too, called ROMcrack, it used the same method of the virus to stay resident and survive the reset, was nice
Back in the days i had this very peculiar virus-killer that whould recognize ONLY the SCA pattern on disk, replace it with a standard dos boot-sector and play a sample of Queen's "we are the champions"when succeeded. Anyone remembers it?
5:10 "legitimate copies" - it's funny how weirdly obsessed commercial pirates are with keeping their pirated warez from being pirated again
I'd say it's more a legitimacy phrase. If I have a "legit copy" I dumped myself, then I know it will be the same as my "official copy." A pirated copy would therefore mean I have no clue if the game is 1:1 perfect or if something is inconsistent for whatever reason, and I have no way to check the original dump source.
Well, yeah, if they're selling their stolen goods for money, they don't want people stealing them for free.
Something similar happened to me when we got our first PC in 1990. I went to school excited to talk to my friends who also had a computer. They'd bring me some games. Gave me some disks a few days later, took them home, and presto: my introduction to computer viruses with the Form.exe virus (boot sector virus). This was well before antivirus software so we had to unplug and take the computer back to the guy who sold it to us because we knew almost nothing about them (the floppy drive clicking and thumping away madly in this case and the computer eventually not booting up). Learned not to just stick any old disk into the floppy drive. Thanks for the great video!
I remember it well.
There were a lot of viruses about.
The Byte Bandit virus was a bit of a pig at the time and would render a lot of disks useless.
First virus I ever saw was on mom’s work computer with windows 3.1. It was a floppy passed around the office with a custom screen saver. It’s interesting how they managed to spread without internet and how little people knew about viruses. It was common to just insert and run and unknown floppy without any kind of protection. I remember that I was scared of floppy discs as a kid thinking they all had viruses.
Remember kids, the publishers need you to max out your parents' credit cards on the game. Don't disappoint them, you can use the gambling mechanics disguised as random loot to achieve this quickly. Good luck.
The primary reason i learned assembler back in the early 90s was to write TSRs and some basic replicating viruses on PC. I just used to replicate and flash up messages, just to see how many of my mates noticed when i handed out disks. You could get virus source off BBS's and then learn how they worked back in the day. These days I think I'm doing well when a i get Golang bin down to a few MB but then i think back to the time you could literally hand code a TSR in about 15 mins on-the-fly using the standard tools in DOS, let alone a full assembler suite.
The Short Circuit reference makes me like these guys even more. I love those movies!
Los locos kick your face into outer space!!!
One of the most interesting videos I've had suggested in ages, on a topic I normally wouldn't seek after. Massive kudos.
Does anyone remember a program on the Amiga called "Virus Construction Set" or something along those lines? It was a program that could extract the virus from the bootblock and store it in a local database. You could then boot up VCS and select a virus you wanted to install onto the disk. Some of the viruses could be installed in parallel, meaning the disk could have had more than one virus on it. Back then, we had fun installing viruses on a friends system thinking nothing of it. I would never dream of doing such things today.
I never had it, but I heard about it. I did have a disc that booted into a menu that let you choose 4 viruses to install. I never clicked, I had a friend that was bugged by the Sadam-virus so I knew this could have serious consequences.
@@Gekneveld Saddam had it coming.
I had that, it was a bunch of bootblock virii stored as files, you select the virus, and that file was written out as a bootblock to a disk. Also, you could modify some of the virii, but even modified ones where detected by the anti-virus tools of the time as vcs based virii.
The book "More Tricks & Tips for the Amiga" had a source listing for a program to remove the SCA virus entitled "The ultimate virus killer" lol
Good vid mate, more Amiga content please!
Great video! I am 99% sure that the commercial release of Vader shipped with the SCA virus.
Never knew about any of this, but can feel all the emotions as you described getting hit with the virus. Fantastic coverage 🖤
I wrote a Trojan or botnet as a exercise, it connected to an IRC channel where I could send commands to them and accidentally released it through the file sharing platform direct connect. It infected several hundred computers but it did nothing by default and had no ability to be destructive to the host.
Luckily I included the ability to 'dissolve' the trojan by deleting itself and the startup methods which I did and never used any of the features of the trojan which mainly was for DDoS attacks.
I dunno if it's cos I'm high but this is really funny
OMG! I had that same virus on my A500! I haven’t seen that screen in almost forty years. I always figured I brought it home from SMAUG the Southern Maine Amiga Users Group where we traded disks a lot.
Yeah, I remember this. My first computer virus infection. And it did ruin some of my track loader games. Shortly afterwards people started talking about scary (and impossible) viruses that could "infect" the RTC on some memory expansion cards, lol!
Getting malware before the days of modern internet must be horrifying. Where would the average Joe even turn to?
Had to take our computer to the guy that sold it to us as we were clueless at that point about computers besides how to run programs. It WAS terrifying to have an expensive machine my parents bought become a brick on the desk.
I remember having had two viruses on the Amiga but I don't remember the name.
One was more of a 'fun' virus that melted the workbench, I got rid of it quickly with an antivirus disc. It didn't seem to do any damage apart from locking up you Amiga.
The other one was on an infected copy of Oktalyzer. It ruined all my oktalyzer modules and some data on other discs too. I remember that it renamed the files as well.
At one point a had a disc with a small menu on which you could choose to install 4 viruses. Never used it.
The last virus I had was only last years. A trojan for windows that was hidden on a linux distribution (Slax). It quickly spread on all my HD's but I managed to get it off with some boot disc (defender couldn't manage it).
Oh, Oktalyzer - I remember that one. A somewhat noisy eight-track music tracker, right?
@bigredracingteam9642 Indeed! That's the one! It had 8 channels. I also remember that the sample editor was rather good. I also remember one of the demosongs as it sounded rather 'industrial'. But that might be a broken memory 😆.
This came on on background auto play for me after watching your Shadow of the Beast video, and my first thought was “Awesome, MVG’s done a deep dive video on Lemmings!”
Huh, thankfully here in the US I didn't know anyone else with an Amiga. So we had no way of sharing floppies. I didn't learn about viruses until later.
I myself inadvertently wrote a virus for the Amiga. I had created a security program to protect my floppies, but somewhere I had made a mistake and it unintentionally infected other floppies. Fortunately, it was not widespread and I was still able to stop it from doing further harm.
Did it survive a warm reset?
@bigredracingteam9642 Yes, it did
The true moral of the story is that DRM is worse than a virus. Try installing a Windows XP game with Starforce and look what happens to a Windows 10 bootable device.
Oh yes. Just a few days ago I ripped disks to play an old game on my Steam Deck and it refused to start with an error message it couldn't find a legit copy of Windows 95, 98 or XP. No surprise there since it was SteamOS and Proton. So I needed to find a No CD Patch anyway which wasn't easy. It's awful how difficult things are made for legitimate customers all in the name of combating piracy, but ultimately pirates end up with the better experience
@Thornskade That reminds me. Though subtle due to being an industrial standard at the time, requiring a disk to be inserted was also DRM! And yes, it can make things difficult these days. Thank God for GoG!
Hey MVG just letting you know there is a pretty bad humming sound in the background on some parts of the video. Almost sounds like a cable thats not entirely plugged in or something similar.
As a kid I remember that virus. Although we didn't have a HD on the Amiga at the time and one of our biggest troubleshooting steps was to turn the computer off and on. So it never infected any other disks.
Am trying hard to imagine a scenario where a virus would have hit me, an average A1200 user: I didn't have a hard disk, my floppy disks had write protection notch set... I am so glad this missed me. And yeah, over the 42 years I have been computing, I have had my fair share of destructive viruses, not being condescending.
Oh ffs my ffs is infested
Me only now realized what is the other thing 🤣
@@とふこI thought it was something to do with nazis (SS)
I had something similar happen to my Amiga in the early 90s. It even knackered my friend's copy of Falcon, that I'd borrowed from him. In my case, the little critter responsible was Byte Bandit.
Perth gets a mention in the newspaper article. We have a strong Amiga User group in Perth still.
I remember we had a very handy little boot block utility. It booted up in one second, It was a virus checker and cleaner, you could copy it to any normal floppy boot block. It also let you switch between PAL or NTSC and choose if memory expansion was Fast or Chip RAM. I had it on all my utility disks and any games that needed PAL or chip RAM.
I also learned hard way to keep writing protect on.
I'm a bit too young to have known this part of the computers history (the first computer I used was a Windows 98), so it was interesting to learn about that. Thanks for the video!
Another banger story from the GOAT. Nice work MVG.
Side note: Later Amiga viruses stored the original boot sector(s) to a free block on the disk. Using a disk editor you could repair the disks, if you knew that to look for.
Dad got me a Commadore Amiga 500 about 89. Used to bring home a list of games and then come home with the ones I selected a couple days later. I still pirate the majority of the games I play @ 43
I had an Amiga Virus back around the mid 90s on my Amiga 500. It wasn't this one, but it eventually managed to corrupt my AmigaBasic disk and I was so upset I cried. Good times.
I give you Credit Dude! I only knew of Macintosh Computers when I went to School and when I got home my Parent's had the Windows 3.1 which later got Upgraded to Windows 95 I never owned a Amiga Computer!
Getting a virus was a rite of passage back then.
What a fascinating story! As someone who has never seen an amiga computer in his life...
If you had the original Commodore 1MB RAM expansion that contained a battery to mantain the clock settings, you were in trouble because, even if you turned off the Amiga, some viruses still remained in memory thanks to that battery. Viruses were so common back in the days but you can still find them today in some disk images from tosec.
I remember that hoax. And it was a hoax.
That was a lie, all the battery was for was the clock. But an Amiga does keep stuff in ram for a 'while' even turned off, if you just turned it off and back on, the virii could stay in ram, I was told to wait at least 30 seconds to clear the ram, Even on my 1200 I still have, if it crashes badly enough, with it having 32mb ram, if you turn it back on after a bad crash, it will just either crash or guru straight away.
First virus I remember getting was "Your computer is now Stoned", which worked pretty much the same as this, came on a PC version copy of Xenon II.
Stoned is the only PC virus I ever got hit with. After that, I paid attention to what I was running, that's for sure. I mean, we couldn't have me AND the PC being stoned all the time ...
I immediately thought the line was a reference to the movie 2010, with it's enigmatic and eerie repetition of " what will happen? Something wonderful."; but touche, Mr. Johnny 5.
This is absolutely amazing video! Bravo bro! 👊🏼
the first amiga virus i encountered was a disk validator virus. iirc the saddam virus?
it infected/replaced the disk validator - a system program on standard amiga disks.
but there where anti virus software available at that time, so not much harm was done.
later i installed kickstart 2.05 where the diskvalidator was moved to rom (no more diskvalidator on disk). solved the problem eventually.
The first virus I ran into was on a Tandy 1000. All it said was "Your PC is now stoned." and it didn't really do anything that I noticed.
As a causal Amiga user I never came across this back in the day. Very interesting - and now I know to be on the lookout for this if I get back into the Amiga.
Der Bootsektor bei AMIGA Software wurde zerstört. Danke für den Spaß, denn anfangs ließen sich nur DOS-Spiele reparieren. Bootloader waren zerstört.
I had so many problems with something called Byte Bandit back in the day. Hated it!
I remember that too, by name at least.
The first time I saw a virus running on my Amiga I was like, "Cool!" because it was so stylish. A two-day virus-scanning marathon later with seemingly endless streams of files being checked on two different machines and I didn't think it was so cool anymore. Note: The Amiga can bypass the write-protection notch.
Something wonderful has happened! MVG uploaded!
I ran a BBS bac k in those days... before the internet and cable modems turned up.. some virus's back then were quite sophisticated, the Lamer Exterminator virus used the scanline position of the rastered pixel to encrypt itself in memory
I don't remember if I ever had the SCA virus, but I did have a commercial copy (factory sealed) of Strip Poker that came with a virus on it. Fortunately, the virus checker program I had on my Amiga at the time had already been updated for that particular virus, so it was easy to remove it.
"most of us owned Amigas, PCs at that time were unaffordable to most students unless you had rich parents"
The notion in the retro community that PCs were always far more expensive than Commodore products is a myth that can easily be disproven by checking prices published in computer magazines of that era. In 1987 the Amiga 500 launched for US$699 where as in the same year a turbo XT clone could be bought for US$375-425. By 1991 the Amiga had dropped in price but so had PCs and for the same price as a Amiga 500 you could get a 16mhz 286 clone. When you factor in the price of adding a hard drive and monitor, the PC actually comes out to be far cheaper. As a result Amiga's tended to be owned by wealthier families where as by 1991 PCs had replaced the c64 as the budget option for low income families in Australia. I speak of this as someone who grew up in a working class area in Australia and who worked part-time throughout high school in a computer store. My family and most the other computer focused students in my schools ended up with PCs because Amigas were simply too expensive for most of us.
Something wonderful has happened. Your phone is alive!
Amazing video as always! While I knew about the existence of this virus, hearing this story from someone who was actually an Amiga user and encountered it in the wild like that is fascinating! Plus I didn't know that much about SCA as a group. I generally love it whenever you talk about the Amiga or the demo scene, so this was a real treat.
Small correction though: at 4:30 you call Brain the first virus to make its way to home computers. It's not an entirely accurate way of phrasing it; it was indeed the first known *IBM PC* virus. However, there were earlier examples of viruses for other microcomputers, notably the Apple II. The most common consensus is that Elk Cloner from 1982 is the first home computer virus.
Still, Brain can be, in a way, considered the first home computer virus of renown, so I get wanting to talk about that particular example. It's a more apt comparison to the SCA virus, anyways. Small nitpick but hey, early computer viruses are kinda my area of study, so I can't help but point it out.
Anyways, can't wait for the next video! Huge fan of what you do here.
I never had an Amiga but I heard about this virus. Thanks for doing a video about this virus.
I’m pretty sure Lotus on the PC could ignore the write protection on floppy discs or did I have a faulty drive?
It’s mind blowing how virusses and the digital spreading of those virusses already dates back to the 1980’s.
Who had ever throught that despite not many people did had a computer, that there were even hackers aound there back then.
Wow, that's an obscure Queen song that USI showed up. It shows up in "Highlander" when Kurgan is driving, IIRC.
5:40 And thus the first computer scam call center was born
This is great. I was just thinking about those days recently, and thought to myself that I wish you’d do more scene videos. More please.
@0:26 My favourite Amiga Cracktro was/is Chuck Rock II - Anthrox.
Not sure if it was a virus or not back in the day. but i had Mc Donald land game and Ctrl A A would not reset the game and it would always come back.
My first experience with computer viruses was with NATAS in 1995, it was quite a epidemic at the computer lab.
Now I want to go home and play with my Amiga 500.... and begin again my search for a keyboard for my 1000 that won't break the bank ;) Great video!
"Something wonderful has happened" reminds me of the spooky scene in 2010 (the sequel to 2001) where Dave Bowman appears on his wife's TV. Very underrated film by the way
Todays most common virus is Happy New Year 1994, shorted as HNY94. It still returns, over and over again.
Hny96 - it's a link virus tho. Very wide spread bastard, yes 😤 MVG should cover that one, too . Had it so many times.
It is crazy to think after all these years if you pirate a game the same thing can happen.