14 DAY TRIAL // Perhaps you've heard of Angelina, or Stoned. Angelina? it's the same thing actually. It's a computer virus that when infecting a machine, will spread all over it and possibly damage a floppy disk. Most people have stopped using floppy disks for some time now, so they are not going to be affected by this little threat.
Also, Angelina is 13 years old - it has been disclosed back in '94 and most anti-viruses eliminate it on sight. So why is this virus in our attention now? Well, because you can get it as a "default application" with some computers. German PC vendor Medion gave some of its customers an unwanted blast from the past when it shipped laptops loaded with a 13-year-old virus, as Vnunet informs us.
Boy, isn't that just annoying? Not that this would be a huge threat or something like that, but a lot of people buy a new computer and expect it to be good, and instead, they wake up with a virus on their machine. The sloppiness that Medion has just shown us, counters the great HP initiative of selling a gaming PC with AVG already installed on it.
This is not the only time that a product came with an infection straight out of the factory. If a virus gets his way in one of the network computers, then it can certainly go and infect new products - so you get a brand new PC with a nicely polished virus - two at the price of one! What a great deal!
Some famous examples are the iPod case, back in 2006 (they shipped thousands of infected video iPods to China), or the McDonald Mp3 Player case (thousands of players that were supposed to be prizes had been recalled, because they had a Trojan infestation). So, as you can see, this stuff can happen, and there's not much you can do about it, because you can't possibly predict if there's going to be a virus on your new machine or not.