About Scores

Scores was a computer virus that affected Macintosh machines. It was first discovered in Spring 1981. It is said that Scores was written by a disgruntled programmer and specifically attacks two applications that were under development at his former company, yet these programs were never released to the public. It has several aliases such as Eric, Vult, NASA and San Jose Flu but it is more known for the name "Scores". It is quite similar to the nVIR virus, though does not appear to be based on it. The Scores virus gets its name from the file it drops in the system folder.

The virus first went after System, Notepad, and Scrapbook files in System 6 and 7. If the icons for these files were blank document icons, it was likely that the system had been infected as Normal Notepad and Scrapbook icons will have specific icons under System 7, or little Macintosh icons under System 6.

It remains dormant for two days after infecting the system folder. Three different processes "wake up" after two, four, and seven days. After two days, the virus infects any file that is opened.

After four days, it checks to see if any programs with the ERIC or VULT signatures are active. If this is the case, the virus will cause these programs to crash after 25 minutes. If the Macsbug debugger is installed, the user will see a user break. If a debugger is not installed, the system will crash.

If you start a program with the VULT signature after seven days, the virus will prevent you from writing to a drive. If there are no other attempts to write to a disk for 10 minutes, the program will crash, just as it does after four days. The virus also includes code in its seven-day sequence that causes a crash after forty-five minutes, but this is never used because the code to cause a crash after twenty-five minutes remains active.


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