Just this weekend I was writing to a reader about anti-virus protection for his PC, and I noted in passing that it is new viruses that pose a much greater threat to your computer, not the tens of thousands of old ones that are no longer "in the wild," since new ones are far more likely to be actually spreading.
Well today's news offers a humbling caveat to that general rule: A mountain of laptop computers sold in Denmark and Germany have been found to contain a boot virus dating from 1994: A virus called Stoned Angelina which moved your computer's boot sector (but otherwise did no harm aside from replicating itself on additional PCs).
All the laptops were pre-loaded with Vista and an anti-virus system called Bullguard. Bullguard later explained that the virus is so old that signatures for the virus were no longer included in the company's virus definitions package. It's entirely likely that many other anti-virus systems would have missed removal of Stoned Angelina as well.
Still, it's an important reminder of a few issues: First, older threats can stick with us for far longer than we might otherwise have imagined (maybe forever). And perhaps more importantly, remember that you can't even trust brand new equipment from being malware-free. Your first order of business with any new computer should be to install and run an anti-virus application, no matter how clean it appears at first glance.
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