Medion sells laptops with an unwanted guest- a 13 year-old virus

by Dhiram Shah

Possible the worst case for Ripley’s Believe it or Not, but the fact that German PC vendor Medion shipped laptops loaded with a 13 year-old virus called Stoned Angelina via Aldi retail stores. Apparently the virus stores itself in the DOS boot sector of floppy disks and in the master boot record on hard disks. The news was reported on the Danish website of Medion so it’s not clear whether the infected PCs were sold to Denmark only because other international sites don’t have the notice on. Medion has suggested that customers “clean up their systems by reinstalling the operating system from the recovery CD included with the system.” Ironically the computers were preloaded with the latest version of Windows Vista and Bullguard’s anti virus which failed to detect the virus. This event will surely Medion and Bullguards executives in embarrassment.



According to the security vendor Symantec there is little security risk from the virus, which was discovered in 1994. Stoned Angelina is designed to do nothing more than attempt to spread and replicate. F-Secure say that an edit made to the DOS boot sector by the virus could possibly damage floppy disks. However most antivirus applications will detect and eliminate the threat.

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