BHP-Virus
The BHP virus was the first computer virus for the Commodore 64 ever. It is often mistakenly said to be the first virus in computer history. However, this is not true as there were other viruses before it; most notably for CP/M and the Apple 2e. As with all Commodore 64 programs, BHP began with some code written in BASIC. This code consisted of a single line, a SYS call to the assembler code, where the rest of the virus resided. Unlike many programs, the virus code built the address to call dynamically. This may have been written by a very careful coder, but it proved to be unnecessary because the address did not change in later versions of the machine. Behavior[edit | edit source]Once the assembler code gained control, it placed itself in the block of memory that was normally occupied by the I/O devices when the ROM was banked-in. Displays text under certain conditions: DR.DR.STROBE&PAPA HACKER WAS HERE! COPROGRAMMER: GARFIELD HALLO DICKERCHEN, DIES IST EIN ECHTER VIRUS! SERIALNO.:2 Stealth[edit | edit source]A side-effect of memory-banking was that it was a great way to hide a program, since the program was not visible if its memory was not banked in. This is the reason why BHP placed its code in banked memory. After copying itself to banked memory, the virus restored the host program to its original memory location and restored the program size to its original value. This allowed the host program to execute as though it were not infected. However, at this time the virus would verify the checksum of the virus's Basic code, and would overwrite the host memory if the checksum did not match. An interesting note about the checksum routine is that it missed the first three bytes of the code, which were the line number and SYS command. This made the job easier for the person who produced the later variant of the virus. Although the later variant differed only in the line number, this was sufficient to defeat the BHP-Killer program, because BHP-Killer checked the entire Basic code, including the line number. The virus checked whether it was running already by reading a byte from a specific memory location. If that value matched the expected value, the virus assumed that another copy was running. Thus, writing that value to that memory location would have been an effective inoculation method. If no other copy of the virus was running, the virus would copy some code into a low address in non-banked memory, and hook several vectors, pointing them to the copied code. Hooking the System[edit | edit source]The virus hooked the ILOAD, ISAVE, MAIN, NMI, CBINV and RESET vectors. The hooking of MAIN, NMI, CBINV and RESET made the virus Break-proof, Reset-proof, and Run/Stop-Restore-proof. Once the hooks were in place, the virus ran the host code. The main virus code would be called on every request to load or save a file. The ILOAD hook was reached when a disk needed to be searched. This happened whenever a directory listing was requested, and could happen when a search was made using a filename with wildcards, or the first time that a file was accessed. Otherwise, the drive hardware cached up to 2kb of data and returned it directly. The virus called the original ILOAD handler, then checked whether an infected program had been loaded. If an infected program had been loaded, the virus restored the host program to its original memory location and restored the program size to its original value. Otherwise, even if no file had been loaded, the virus called the infection routine. The ISAVE hook was reached whenever a file was saved. The virus called the original ISAVE handler to save the file, then called the infection routine. The infection routine began by checking that the requested device was a disk drive. If so, then the virus opened the first file in the cache. The first file in the cache would be the saved file if this code was reached via the ISAVE hook, otherwise it would be the first file in the directory listing. If the file was a Basic program, then the virus performed a quick infection check by reading the first byte of the program and comparing it against the SYS command. If the SYS command was present, the virus verified the infection by reading and comparing up to 27 subsequent bytes. A file was considered infected if all 27 bytes matched. If the file was not infected, the virus switched to reading data from the hardware cache. The first check was for a standard disk layout: the directory had to exist on track 18, sector 0, and the file to infect had not to have resided on that track. If these checks passed, the virus searched the track list for free sectors. It began with the track containing the file to infect, then moved outwards in alternating directions. This reduced the amount of seeking that the drive had to perform in order to read the file afterwards. If at least eight free sectors existed on the same track, then the virus allocated eight sectors for itself and updated the sector bitmap for that track. The virus wrote itself to disk in the following manner: the first sector of the host was copied to the last sector allocated by the virus, then that first sector was replaced by the first sector of the virus. After that, the remaining virus code was written to the remaining allocated sectors. The directory stealth was present here, and it existed without any effort on the part of the virus writer(s). It was a side-effect of the virus not updating the block count in the directory sector. The block count was not used by DOS to load files, its purpose was informational only, since it was displayed by the directory listing. After any call to ILOAD or ISAVE, the virus checked whether the payload should activate. The conditions for the payload activation were the following: that the machine was operating in direct mode (the command-prompt), that the seconds field of the jiffy clock was a value from 2…4 seconds, and that the current scan line of the vertical retrace was at least 128. This made the activation fairly random. The payload was to display a particular text, one character at a time, while cycling the colours of the border The serial number that was displayed was the number of times the payload check was called. It was incremented once after each call, and it was carried in replications. It reset to zero only after 65,536 calls. Video[edit | edit source]What happens if the BHP-Virus is active!
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