What is a boot sector virus?

A boot sector virus is a type of malware that infects the boot partition of a storage device. A boot sector is the reserved section of a disk containing all the information required to boot up a system. When a system is booted from such an infected storage device, the boot sector virus gets executed and loaded into the computer's memory before the security software is run.

What makes a system catch a boot sector virus?

A system becomes vulnerable to boot sector viruses in a number of ways, including:

• Booting up the system through an infected floppy disk

• Downloading or executing files from untrusted sources

• Spam email attachments

Boot sector viruses were more common in the past when the systems were booted up through floppy disks, which is not a common practice anymore. Nonetheless, the threat still remains and could prove costly, especially for legacy systems.

How dangerous is this virus?

The boot sector virus, like any other computer virus, can perform a number of malicious activities on the system that it resides in. For example:

• It can spread and even replicate itself to other storage devices, infecting their boot sectors. Any systems that are booted through such devices can then become infected.

• It can even cause damage to existing critical data or even delete it.

• It can also render a system unbootable.

• It can also execute unauthorized actions.

Prevention measures

The following prevention measures can be taken against boot sector viruses:

• Exercising caution when booting up from external storage devices

• Using reputable antivirus software

• Regularly updating the operating system and security patches

• Only downloading and executing email attachments from trusted senders

Once the system is infected, it can be recovered by formatting the disk and rolling back to the full-image backup that was created before the infection occurred.