Emperor

The Emperor virus carries a payload that displays the following message when triggered:

EMPEROR

I will grind my hatred upon the loved ones.

Despair will be brought upon the hoping childs of happiness. Wherever there is joy the hordes of the eclipse will pollute sadness and hate under the reign of fear.

Type:	Virus
Infection Length:	5826 bytes



Wild Number of infections: 0 - 49 Number of sites: 0 - 2 Geographical distribution: Low Threat containment: Easy Removal: Easy

Threat Metrics Wild: Low Damage: Low Distribution: Low

Distribution

• Target of infection: DOS, COM and EXE files

Once the MBR is infected, the virus must be running in order to access the hard drive. The same also applies to infected floppy disks. An infected floppy cannot be read from or written to by a clean system. The data on the hard drive and floppy are still intact. If the virus finds specific bytes present in the MBR during infection, it will zero out the CMOS RAM. If this happens, the current CMOS settings are lost.

If the payload has not been triggered, restoring the infected MBR with a clean one can repair the hard drive. Similarly, restoring the infected boot record with a clean one can repair floppy disks. After restoring the MBR and boot record, the data can be accessed. The infected files still need to be repaired.

An infected hard drive may not always boot up even to a clean boot floppy. In this case, the MBR has been corrupted beyond the PC's ability to recognize the hard drive. To fix this problem, you can boot to an early version of DOS, like 3.x. Then, you can use disk utility programs to repair the hard drive.

Symantec Security Response encourages all users and administrators to adhere to the following basic security "best practices":

• Turn off and remove unneeded services. By default, many operating systems install auxiliary services that are not critical, such as an FTP server, telnet, and a Web server. These services are avenues of attack. If they are removed, blended threats have less avenues of attack and you have fewer services to maintain through patch updates.
• If a blended threat exploits one or more network services, disable, or block access to, those services until a patch is applied.
• Always keep your patch levels up-to-date, especially on computers that host public services and are accessible through the firewall, such as HTTP, FTP, mail, and DNS services (for example, all Windows-based computers should have the current Service Pack installed.). Additionally, please apply any security updates that are mentioned in this writeup, in trusted Security Bulletins, or on vendor Web sites.
• Enforce a password policy. Complex passwords make it difficult to crack password files on compromised computers. This helps to prevent or limit damage when a computer is compromised.
• Configure your email server to block or remove email that contains file attachments that are commonly used to spread viruses, such as .vbs, .bat, .exe, .pif and .scr files.
• Isolate infected computers quickly to prevent further compromising your organization. Perform a forensic analysis and restore the computers using trusted media.
• Train employees not to open attachments unless they are expecting them. Also, do not execute software that is downloaded from the Internet unless it has been scanned for viruses. Simply visiting a compromised Web site can cause infection if certain browser vulnerabilities are not patched.

If you believe you have been infected, please download the latest virus definitions via LiveUpdate or from the Symantec Security Response Web site.

• Click here for instructions on using LiveUpdate to retrieve virus definitions.
• Click here to manually download and install virus definitions from the Symantec Security Response Web site.

Write-up by: Wason Han