A three-year-old Cleveland, Ohio software developer called FoundationWare claims to have a $189 package, suitably dubbed Vaccine, that will prevent viruses, stop bombs, catch bugs, protect against unauthorised systems use, reduce user errors and recover data. The program comes in six MS-DOS-based modules and the company promises that the chances of a virus infecting a system using them is less than one in one billion. If it works, it’s probably just in time. Experts quoted by FoundationWare reckon some 20,000 businesses were infected by viruses last year and, judging by the headlines, the scare only seems to be mounting. Particularly vulnerable are government agencies and companies with lots of computers networked together. To insere against Trojan Horses, Time Bombs and other viruses, Vaccine’s Boot-Time Quality Assurance Module is supposed to discover infected files each time the computer boots up while the memory- resident 600 byte Run-Time Quality Assurance Module checks each program on the system before it’s loaded to see that it meets the original factory specifications. If it’s been tampered with in any way, it won’t be loaded. FoundationWare says the memory resident 4Kb Surveillance Module protects against 90% of all illegal disk-writes or erasures, both accidental and sinister, that could destroy data and as a further safeguard the Bomb Shelter Module makes the hard disk inaccessible and its data inviolate while the user test suspects software for viruses. Lastly, if all else fails, FoundationWare says its Critical Disk will automatically recover erased or damaged data. As an added benefit, there’s also an Installation & System Check-up Module that wil look at the hard disk and check for appropriate use of subdirectories, invoke the limited safety features available to MS-DOS and assure proper use of CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAK files for maximum MS-DOS security and efficiency. French, German and Italian language versions are promised.
