amiga-news.de - Virus Help Denmark celebrates 10th anniversary

02.Jan.2004
Jan Andersen (E-Mail)

Virus Help Denmark celebrates 10th anniversary
The Virus Help Team Denmark (VHT-DK) celebrates its 10th anniversary during these days. The editorial staff says "Happy Birthday". Lars P. Kristensen who works for Virus Help Denmark has gathered some information about the history of this honorary organization:

Many people have asked us why and for what? We haven't really been able to respond to this question other than "it's a hobby". Well then some others says, "this must cost you a great deal of money". Actually not, I don't think our lives - so fare - would have been without a computer anyway. Our families have somehow accepted our interest. Then what have we gained from all this. A lot of friends and many contacts. I think this in general goes for most of us in VHT-DK.

Shortly after the appearance of the Amiga, the "evil viral" showed their ugly faces. Most of us went from the old Commodore C64 to Amiga, with all it's advanced graphic, audio and like, some of us didn't even thought of the risks from the viruses before it was all too late, it was just a "phenomenon" one could read had happened to somebody else. The "phenomenon's" became known with names like "ByteBandit" and "BSG9", these were among many others of the early boot block virus. The virus installed itself right into the boot block and normally easy removed, by simply installing a standard boot block, however as "piracy" also is a "thing" to deal with, many software houses tried to protect their work by changing the sync value or other tricks to prevent "disk swapping". To do that it required a special boot block installed and when the virus infected the boot block, the entire disk was destroyed. Well, we haven't seen a new boot block virus for some time, because they are easily detected with the programs available today. Later the file- and link virus appeared.

The programs Virus Help Denmark distribute is only share- and freeware - Virus Help Denmark runs non-profit. It is a fact that all attempts to make a commercial virus killer for the Amiga has failed. They were outrunned by people who simply had their heart at the right place. Combined with the fact that programming of such software isn't just a nine to five job - it simply needs true dedication.

Who is Virus Help Denmark and what do they do - a simple presentation:

Jan Andersen: Webmaster, keeps track off what's going on, supporting Amiga users.
Torben Danoe: PC-guy.
Jan Nielsen: PC-guy, works with Torben and supports PC-users and the PC-Disk.
Henrik Lauridsen: Internet supporter.
Lars P. Kristensen: Amiga user supporter, translator, and "PR"-guy.
Jan Erik Olausen: Programmer of VirusExecutor and Amiga support.

This is a very short description, most off us are still having an Amiga, but the time between the use of it, is getting longer and longer, we all have daily jobs and families to support as well. I could fill pages, with lots of stuff concerning what the five of us has overcome since the early ninety's. I would rather prefer telling the history behind VHT DK, and this started for me at the summertime 1991. The summer I got attacked by a simple virus named ByteBandit. I found a coverdisk which contained a few shareware programs - mainly from the "Fish Library" - every Amiga guy should know Fred Fish and the tremendous work he did to get programmers and users closer. However I found this disk and ZeroVirus, I quickly read the documentation and stumbled over a name - a Danish name: Erik Løvendal Sørensen. Erik had had a similar situation to my own. But - differently - he started to collect the viruses and mailed them to authors of antivirus programs, which didn't yet, supported the virus he mailed. Then he put "The New Superkiller" (TNS) together. By the time I got it, it was stuffed with antivirus programs to the limit.

A day during Easter 1992 I was down to visit Erik. Then I met Jan Andersen and Torben Danø. I have seen Jan shortly (he can't remember - he's just getting older) talking to Erik about how he had shown the TNS to some pupils at an evening school and taught them how to use it. A month or so after Easter, the two guys forming RVC-DK wished to leave to pay a greater attention to their study. I had had a wish to join the center from the day I started in SHI - now that possibility was in reach. Erik thought it was better if I stayed at "my post", however he hadn't any complaints when Jan was pointed at as a new RVC leader. What the heck. I called Jan and fortunately he lived just 25 km's from me. The next month Jan and I redesigned the whole set of disks. Time demanded a Kick2.0 disk and we first tried different versions of "softkick's" (Jan had a hard drive - lucky him). Well, we equipped Jan's A500 with a Kick2.0 ROM and that gave us a lot of new possibilities, one was to use the entire 880KB of a disk. Shortly after Jan and I teamed up, Jan Nielsen (Jan-Jan), Torben Danø and Henrik Lauridsen joined to be part of the action.

Soon Jan established SHI BBS. First he figured out the MAX BBS system but soon he changed to - and learned to master - the STARNET BBS system (the prior system to MEBBS net) under which the system performed to the end. The system almost killed Jan, he wanted the system to be no less than 100 percent secure and he actually took a bet with another SHI guy, who claimed he could hack the BBS. As fare as I know, Jan is still waiting to collect the bet. However, Jan also did a heck off a job in keeping the BBS up to date, he actually "haunted" every corner of all the great BBS-sites and nets to seek new updates all the time. One more thing, Jan is also the author of the "VirusWarning.guide", a news-guide about virus, what archives they were spread in and where they were found - actually he is still updating it today.

However, by the end of 1993 the five of us performing under SHI in the RVC known as "SHI Team Denmark" discovered that SHI in general took a different path, we decided to resign from SHI and keep on the path we had followed so fare. There were many reasons that lead us to this conclusion and it wasn't easy for any of us to leave. As fare as I know SHI doesn't exist anymore, however, lots of friends met each other in SHI and lots of new great ideas evolved from the endless brainstorms we had. From the start of 1994 Virus Help Team Denmark took off - the name had slightly changed as the words "Team Denmark" is copyrighted, today we function under the name "Virus Help Denmark".

By that time the Internet hadn't evolved into this communicator it is today, then there were nets like FIDONET, a local net in Denmark and AMIGANET, a world wide net for the Amiga community. It could take up to a fortnight to get a reply from fare places like Australia or South America and it wasn't right to mail virus around those nets, as executables in archives, attached to personal letters, could be opened and executed by accident. Security on the Internet has been improved dramatically and today virus can be mailed via the net instead of on disks in letters.

When the Internet started to spread among normal users, Jan could see from the log file that users who earlier logged on to the BBS on regular basis, became more and more rear. From my point of view he closed the BBS in the right time, everybody who has a modem, can connect to the Internet and get the updates from the VHT-DK homepage. The link is: www.vht-dk.dk

If you were a regular visitor on the former BBS, then pay this site a visit and you'll find that everything is back, the homepage was actually up and running some time before he closed down the BBS. I know that Jan still keeps the old STARNET system - just in case.

Since the beginning of 1994 Virus Help Teams has been started in Norway, Holland and Canada, some of the guys in those centers are also earlier SHI-guys. In Canada, 'Charlene' has done so much for the VHT all over the world (Thanx for everything Charlene).

Last but maybe the most important thing we want to say is a big 'Thank You' to the antivirus programmers that have supported us in the last 10 years, and hopefully many years in the future:

Georg Hoermann - VirusZ & xvs.library
Jan Erik Olausen - VirusExecutor & xvs.library
Markus Schmall - VirusWorkshop
Heiner Schneegold - VT-Schutz
John Veldthuis - VirusChecker
Alex Van Niel - VirusChecker & VHT Holland
Zbigniew Trzcionkowski - Safe & Mill
Soenke Freitag - For great support
Charlene - VHT Canada
Virus Test Center Hamburg : Great support and help
Dirk Stoecker - xfdaster.library & CheckX
And anyone we might have forgotten......

Kind Regards

The team behind:
Virus Help Denmark

(Written by Lars P. Kristensen - Virus Help Denmark) (nba) (Translation: dr)

[News message: 02. Jan. 2004, 21:45] [Comments: 0]
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