Stoned.Empire.Monkey

SUMMARY

Stoned.Empire.Monkey is a virus with no currently known strains that cause intentional permanent damage. However, a Stoned.Empire.Monkey infection is a major inconvenience.

Threat Assessment

Wild

• Wild Level: Low
• Number of Infections: 0 - 49
• Number of Sites: 0 - 2
• Geographical Distribution: Low
• Threat Containment: Easy
• Removal: Easy

Damage

• Damage Level: Low

Distribution

• Distribution Level: Low

TECHNICAL DETAILS

If you boot from a floppy disk on an infected computer, the system will not find your hard drive. Carried only on diskettes, Stoned.Empire.Monkey spreads easily to systems without protection. Stoned.Empire.Monkey is a memory resident infector of the master boot record on hard drives and the boot sector on floppy disks. When the virus is in memory, it re-routes any boot record access to a copy of the original boot sector.

Stoned.Empire.Monkey encrypts the partition table (an essential part of the system area), moves the original to a different location on the hard drive, and then takes the place of the real partition table. For the system to read the real partition (and see the drive), Stoned.Empire.Monkey must be active in memory. If you boot from a clean floppy disk, thus avoiding the virus, your system cannot access the hard drive by normal means.

Although the Stoned.Empire.Monkey virus was not designed to damage data, it writes to any available disk, regardless of format. This can causes loss of data and formatting on non-DOS disks.

Recommendations

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.

REMOVAL

Norton AntiVirus has provided detection for this virus since 1992.

If this virus has run on an unprotected computer and damaged the partition table, you my be able to rebuild it with a utility such as Norton Disk Doctor.