Viruscan for Leading Edge Computers

Leading Edge would often license third party software and brand it as a Leading Edge product. Leading Edge's Viruscan followed this same philosophy. The Leading Edge Viruscan came with a scan utility and a clean utility loaded onto the disk as well as several documents including a comprehensive list of viruses for the time. Digging around in the digital documentation showed that, apparently, these utilities are McAfee 0.4 programs, licensed and branded as Leading Edge Viruscan.

Stepping back in time to January 1992, The New York Times broke a report that some Leading Edge Computer hard drives had been accidentally infected with the Michealangelo virus at the factory by a compromised software bundle distribution. The company sent out letters to dealers advising them that some machines may have been infected from mid−December though late December of 1991. According to the article, "Leading Edge officials said they planned to send customers who had bought possibly infected machines special software designed to track down and eradicate the virus" (Markoff, 1992).

Evidently, Leading Edge was in a time−crunch to get the Viruscan software out to dealers and eradicate the malware threat to their customers. In their rush, Leading Edge quickly licensed an existing product that could find and remove the Michaelangelo virus for distribution and pasted a hastily designed label to their blue 3 ½" disks. These disks lacked the usually colorful labels that most Leading Edge software packs included, but instead were shipped with a grey label that was apparently printed on a dot matrix printer.

References
The New York Times. (1992). Computers are Distributed Containing Software Virus. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/1992/01/28/business/computers−are−distributed−containing−software−virus.html