Methods for protecting computers from Boot Sector Virus and their effectiveness

University of Basra, College of Computer Engineering

Abstract This paper describes of Boot Sector viruses and shows how they spread into computer systems, and their effect; also the damage caused to computer systems, introducing the best protection methods and effective ways to overcome the boot sector viruses and how to prevent the infection in the future.
Key words: boot sector, protection, infection
Introduction
Nowadays, with the development of computer technology and internet propagation, the most significant tool in the world is the computer. However, the growth of using the internet caused a major serious problem which is virus’s offensives on the computers and loss the security and breach the privacy of the vast majority of the clients during their using the internet by personal computers and the most dangerous one, Boot Sector Virus. The memory of computer can be attacked at once the system infected and that led to detect in the performance changing and/or erasing data and even preventing the hard disk from booting.(Computer Virus Preventing and Controlling methods discussion,Yanmei,Xiehong,2010) Although there are many ways has been done to protect computers from viruses hoaxes and prevent the system leaking to vast numbers of computer viruses, in case the Anti-Virus software is outdated or not working, but a few work has been done to protect computer system from boot sector viruses and prevent the biggest damage from happen. Boot Sector viruses or Master Boot Record (MBR) viruses affect the DOS Boot sector or MBR of a computer system, a kind of this infection is really difficult to handling. In 1991, Michelangelo boot sector virus caused a greatest hysteria in the history of viruses. (The virus encyclopedia)
Hence, from regular user of computer to expert one, all need to protect their computers and control the infection. So, I’ll explain how does the boot sector virus work with typical symptoms, the damaging of it and what the methods for protecting computer from the risk of infection as well as their effectiveness.
Boot Sector Understanding how boot sector virus work, required to understand what the boot sector is at first. A hard drive of computers encompass of several segments and clusters of these segment, in other words it is divided into a small memory sections called Sectors. Hard drive may also divided into subdivisions called partition. Boot sector is a first sector in these segments which it contains a Master Boot Record (MBR) which is very important and critical. MBR responsible to find all the information and files then load it and that is needful to boot up the operation system of computer. Boot sector is very important part and MBR is dealing with sensitive critical information files, so any harming or damaging of this information, it surely corrupt it and the operating system of computer can’t be loaded, and this is a huge problem fig (1).

Boot viruses infection technique
Boot sector virus is extremely insidious, which try to cripple the system of computer and take the priority of booting process and that because the Read Only Memory (ROM) does not contain the operation system in it, so as a result, the computer requires to load the system from a disk or USB Ram or any bootable disk. During the time of disk reading, at the first, at the first it will pass to MBR which is give the control to boot sector and at the same time supply all related information about what happen to the disk and what located on it as well as where it lies. These information will be maintain by the boot sector and then specify the disk formatting and the operating system version. The boot sector virus directly infects the MBR files in boot sector and make impossible to load the operation system and read the files on the hard disk fig (2).

Infections and