LYMPH ----- anti-virus media protector NOTE: I strongly suggest reading all of this file as it explains everything. Introduction: ------------- Recently there has been a spate of viruses and Trojans floating around the scene, some designed to destroy bulletin boards, others just to trash anyone's machines. Most of these programs are written, it would seem by inexperienced programmers who are not very adept at hiding the true functions of their programs. But they are getting better and lots of people's machines are getting trashed, not just lamers, but a lot of the elite. It is getting so bad now that people are afraid to run a new demo or intro for fear of it being a trojan and so a lot of stuff probably doesn't receive the same audience as it would have done a few years ago. This pisses me off, I love the Amiga scene and viruses are something that the Amiga has (thankfully) not suffered from too badly, and so I decided it was time for some emergency coding and so I've produced Lymph. Ok, so what is Lymph ? ---------------------- Basically and I'll keep this short, Lymph sits deep inside your Amiga and if any program tries to access a drive you have protected, it isolates the program and prevents it doing any damage. So (theoretically) you can start Lymph and then run any program you like and that program will have real trouble doing anything really nasty to your system. Well thats great, but how do I use it ? --------------------------------------- Using Lymph is simple, to protect a drive, for example DH0: you would just type: Lymph DH0: And if everything worked fine it should say: Now protecting drive DH0: Now your DH0 harddrive is protected, you can still use it totally normally, with no speed loss or restrictions, but a virus would have big problems trashing it (I hope). Not only that, but completly free of charge Lymph will also protect all other partitions of the same drive, so if you have a 80meg harddisk split into DH0: and DH1: it will protect both of them when you just issue the Lymph command once. In fact if you start using this program within 14 days and spread it to your friends, it will also seek out and protect all drives on the same controller. So if you have an A3000T with 4x 2gig drives split into 4 partitions each and each of these drives is connected on to the internal controller, then it will protect all of them in the same way with just the one Lymph command. Likewise if you issue the command "Lymph DF0:" (without the "") it will also protect DF1 DF2 & DF3 free of charge. Well thats nice, but how does it work ? --------------------------------------- Hmmm.. well it doesn't matter how it works, all I can tell you is that it takes no extra processor time, and only 208 bytes of memory for each drive protected. This is only a tiny version of a much more comprehensive piece of software that I hope to write when I get the time, but this has the functionality to protect you for the moment. Lymph should work on all Amiga's and all Harddisk controllers. There could be problems on some more non-standard machines and I would appreciate feedback via email (address at end) if it doesn't work on any particular system. Unfortunatly this piece of code was rather difficult to 'field test' as most people don't react very well when you ask them to run a 1k program and then try and format their harddisk and see 'if it works or not'. So I would not reccomend testing it that way, if you want to see if it works on your machine then try protecting a floppy drive and then try formatting a disk in that drive (preferably one you don't want just in case). But what happens why my system is protected and a virus tries to do ------------------------------------------------------------------- something really nasty to my harddisk ? --------------------------------------- If Lymph detects anything suspicious, it instantly jams your machine so that no program can touch any of your system hardware. You will know this has happened by a screen of scrolling horizontal lines (trust me you can't miss it!) at this point you can either: Press the left mouse button - this kills the program that tried to mess your harddisk around. or.. Hold the right mouse button and then tap the left one - this allows the program to continue doing whatever it was trying to do, personally I'd recommend not doing this until you know what program tried to access your harddisk was. Simple eh? So put Lymph in your startup-sequence today! And tell your friends that there is no longer anything to fear! Known Bugs ---------- The floppy disk protection is not as good as it could be, although your disks are 100% safe when protected with Lymph, it will trigger whenever you put a disk in or take a disk out, which is not exactly helpful. I would recommend not using Lymph to protect floppies, except where you want to run a program and you want to make sure, but not as a general item in your startup-sequence. But then who cares about floppy disks. Also, if you are putting Lymph in your startup-sequence, I suggest putting it at the end, don't ask me why just trust me on this one. Oh yeah its a *REALLY* good idea to put it in ya startup-sequence to protect ya harddisks as you wont ever notice its there until it saves you! Disclaimer and Credits ---------------------- I've written Lymph for my own use so that I believe it is the best protection I can get against trojans etc, without affecting the system performance. However it is not perfect, I'm sure that there are viruses around that could still mangle a harddisk or two, but this should protect most people from most programs. I am not responsable for any damage Lymph does to your system or any damage done by nasty programs whilst Lymph is running. Saying that I think its pretty stable code, so you should have no worries! Oh yeah, also someone might append a virus or something to the code (original should be about 1100 bytes long) and I'm not responsible for that either, if you want to make sure you have a bona-fida copy, get it off the net. Credits: -------- Very quick coding & - Tas of dELiGhT in 1995 Confusing documentation How to contact me.... Feel free to e-mail me at: tas@dawnraid.demon.co.uk With any feedback, comments or success stories.. if it saved you, tell me! Legal stuff ----------- Lymph is freeware, you can use it, spread it to your friends etc in its original form, but it must not be sold in any way except in compliation CD's from the internet or Fred fish. Anyone who wishes to use Lymph in any commercial manner should e-mail me and we can probably work something out. That includes computer magazines. Greets ------ Not enuff time... Kitara, Firefly, ExtremeXS, Talon, Sasha, JR and everyone else who makes my life worth living, more greets in a version that takes more than 12 hours to produce (including sleeping!!) l8rz dudes!!