Anti-Virus at storsand.net

Dr Solomon's Software at storsand.net!

By Andy Ruddock

S&S International, founded by Alan Solomon and his wife Susan, was the company responsible for the production of the premier Anti-Virus software in the UK. (It has always been denied that S&S stood for 'Solomon' & 'Solomon', the reason for the name always being given that it sounded professional whilst also having technical overtones.)

After a management buyout the company aquired a new name, that of Dr Solomon's Software, a name which was already being used on most of the products. It was only after a change of ownership that the name could be changed, Alan always being vehemently against using his name for the company.

In 1998 Dr Solomon's was bought by the US giant Network Associates. It has never been a secret that I was, to say the least, unhappy with this turn of events.
Dr Solomon's had been the target of an aggressive marketing campaign by McAffee, including the famous "The Doctor's Left Town" advert. I seriously doubted that the reputation of the company could be maintained, including that for technical-support which was second-to-none throughout the industry.
So, 1998 brought a move to Norman Data Defense, who had recently opened an office in the UK, conveniently situated five minutes drive from my home in Milton Keynes.

At this point, however, I'd like to state that I never doubted for one minute the integrity of the development staff. I knew that those who decided to stay with Network Associates would continue to strive to produce the best product possible.

The following article appeared in issue #7 of "Dr Solomon's Virus Report", an in-house publication for distribution to corporate customers.

(BTW: The "on-the-phone" photo was no pose - the phone rang just as the photographer arrived. She took the photograph and left before the phone conversation was over.)

Profile: Andy Ruddock

The lead developer of Dr Solomon's Magic Bullet is Andy Ruddock. Andy brings to the large Dr Solomon's development team a deep knowledge of the way PCs work at a very low level.

A quick look at the the virus 'top twenty' shows that macro viruses don't yet have it all their own way. There are still perennial old favourites like Empire.Monkey, Parity Boot, and AntiEXE infecting customers' computer systems.

Boot sector viruses like these infect the boot sectors of floppy diskettes and typically the partition sector (MBR) of the user's hard disk. They are caught by booting (or attempting to boot) off an infected floppy disk. Ever left a floppy in your A: drive when you boot up? Ever seen the message 'Non system disk or disk error'? Then you could have been infected by a boot sector virus.

Although boot sector viruses are the oldest type of virus in existence, many people still have a problem disinfecting them properly. The reason is that usually a clean boot disk is required.

If the user boots from the hard disk, the boot sector virus goes memory-resident and can interfere with the anti-virus. For that reason it is important for the user to be running in a 'clean environment' where the virus is not memory-resident. The simplest way to do this is to boot from a clean (virus free), write-protected, bootable diskette and then run your favourite anti-virus.

However, many users find they do not have a clean bootable diskette ~ maybe all their diskettes have already been infected by the virus, or maybe they bought a computer system which had all its software pre-installed and didn't make available the all-important system diskette.

For this reason Dr Solomon's developed their Magic Bullet diskette (also known as the SOS diskette).

In a nutshell the Magic Bullet is a bootable FindVirus disk. FindVirus has a very specific job to do and that is to detect and disinfect viruses. So there is no need to include a complete operating system or to interface seamlessly with MS-DOS or Windows 95. It is necessary only to boot the PC in a way which enables FindVirus to carry out its job of finding and disinfecting viruses. When a PC is booted with Magic Bullet, the user is provided with an easy-to-use interface, enabling them to detect and clean-up viruses.

"With Dr Solomon's
Magic Bullet disk
you'll never need to look
for a clean disk again."

The beauty of this diskette is that it comes write-protected, bootable, and virus-free straight from Dr Solomon's. Never again does the user have to hunt around for a clean diskette.

When developing the Magic Bullet Andy was faced with an usual challenge: "There can't be many jobs where they ask you to write an operating system from scratch!", explains Andy. "One of the challenges we faced when developing the Magic Bullet was that we didn't want to license the bootable DOS code from Microsoft. Firstly it could have proven expensive, and secondly there are a number of bugs in Microsoft DOS which some viruses deliberately exploit. So we wrote our own version which we call MBOS (Magic Bullet Operating System)."

Recently there have been some exciting new developments in the Magic Bullet. "We've developed our own XMS driver. This means we can use Extended memory, if available, to speed up the scan speed considerably", Andy explains, "we've also added support for FindVirus to be able to scan Partition Magic hidden partitions and Compaq diagnostic partitions. We're also looking at adding NTFS support."

But one of the elements of Magic Bullet of which Andy is most proud is its support for FAT32, a file system commonly used on Win95 systems: "At the Virus Bulletin conference in San Francisco another developer gave a talk about how badly many anti-virus products handle FAT32. I was quite pleased to see that Dr Solomon's Magic Bullet was one of the few products able to handle an infection on that kind of system.".

I learned a lot at Dr Solomon's, working with some great names in Anti-Virus development and support. (People such as Damian Wilson, Paul Lawrence, Peter Morley and David Emm).

I still maintain that an Anti-Virus software house is about the best place to find a deep understanding and technical knowledge of current operating systems and techniques.

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