What is an armored virus?
An ARMORED virus is one which uses special tricks to make the tracing, disassembling and understanding of their code more difficult. A good example is the Whale virus. Go top a10) Miscellaneous Jargon and Abbreviations BSI = Boot Sector Infector: a virus which takes control when the computer attempts to boot (as opposed to a file infector). CMOS = Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor: A memory area that is used in AT and higher class PCs for storage of system information. CMOS is battery backed RAM (see below), originally used to maintain date and time information while the PC was turned off. CMOS memory is not in the normal CPU address space and cannot be executed. While a virus may place data in the CMOS or may corrupt it, a virus cannot hide there. DOS = Disk Operating System. We use the term “DOS” to mean any of the MS-DOS, PC-DOS, or DR DOS systems for PCs and compatibles, even though there are operating systems called “DOS” on other (unrelated) machines. MBR = Master Boot Reco
