Definition: boot sector (boot record): The first sector on a driver where the operating system will bootstrap from. Key point: Until macro viruses came along, boot sector viruses where the most common variant. They spread through companies via floppy disks. Users would leave floppy disks in the drive and when the computer restarted, it would attempt to boot from the floppy. This would run the virus, which then infected the boot sector on the hard drive. Any further floppies plugged into the system would then be infected by the virus. Countermeasures: I worked at a company with anal anti-virus procedures (anti-virus on all desktops, regular wiping of floppy disks). It was never able to completely free itself from the boot sector virus problem; one of the viruses was never successfully eradicated from the company. My own personal policy is to disconnect the floppies on 90% of the machines, and disable floppy bootup on the remaining machines.
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Source: Hacking-Lexicon / Linux Dictionary V 0.16
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/Linux-Dictionary/html/index.html
Author: Binh Nguyen linuxfilesystem(at)yahoo(dot)com(dot)au
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