The Ping-Pong virus (also called Boot, Bouncing Ball, Bouncing Dot, Italian, Italian-A or VeraCruz) is a boot sector virus discovered on March 1, 1988 at the University of Turin in Italy. A computer virus is a Computer program that can copy itself and infect a computer without permission or knowledge of the user Events 86 BC - Lucius Cornelius Sulla, at the head of a Roman Republic army enters in Athens, removing the Tyrant Year 1988 ( MCMLXXXVIII) was a Leap year starting on Friday (link displays 1988 Gregorian calendar) The University of Turin ( Italian Università degli Studi di Torino, UNITO is a University in the city of Turin in the Piedmont region Italy (Italia officially the Italian Republic, (Repubblica Italiana is located on the Italian Peninsula in Southern Europe, and on the two largest It was likely the most common and best known boot sector virus until outnumbered by the Stoned virus. Stoned is the name of a boot sector Computer virus created in 1987 apparently in New Zealand.
Replication method
Computers could be contaminated by it via infected diskette, showing up as a 1 KB bad cluster (the first one on the disk — the boot sector) to most disk checking programs. A kilobyte (derived from the SI prefix Kilo -, meaning 1000 is a unit of Information or Computer storage equal to either 1024 In computer File systems a cluster is the unit of disk space allocation for files and directories A boot sector (sometimes called a bootblock) is a sector of a Hard disk, Floppy disk, or similar Data storage device that contains Due to being labelled as bad cluster, MS-DOS will avoid using it to boot up. MS-DOS (short for M icro' s' oft D isk O perating S ystem is an Operating system commercialized by Microsoft. It infects disks on every active drive and will even infect non-bootable partitions on the hard disk. Disk partitioning is the creation of separate divisions of a Hard disk drive using Partition editors Once a disk is divided into several partitions directories and Upon infection, the virus becomes memory resident.
Effect
The virus would become active if a disk access is made exactly on the half hour and start to show a small "ball" bouncing around the screen in both text mode (the ASCII diamond character "◊") and graphical mode. Text mode is a kind of computer display mode in which the content of the screen is internally represented in terms of textual characters rather American Standard Code for Information Interchange ( ASCII) In Mathematics (more specifically Geometry) a semicircle is a two-dimensional Geometric shape that forms Half of a Circle. No serious damage is occurred by the virus except on '286 machines (and also V20, '386 and '486), which would sometimes crash during the ball's appearance on the screen. The cause of this crash is the "MOV CS,AX" instruction, which only exists on '88 and '86 processors. In the X86 assembly language, the MOV instruction is a Mnemonic for the copying of data from one location to another For this reason, users of machines at risk were advised to save their work and reboot, since this is the only way to temporarily get rid of the virus.
The original Ping Pong virus (Ping-Pong. A) only infects floppy disks. A floppy disk is an increasingly Obsolete data storage medium that is composed of a disk of thin flexible ("floppy" Magnetic storage medium encased Later variants of this virus such as Ping-Pong. B and Ping-Pong. C also infect the hard disk boot sector as well. Whilst the virus is active, one cannot replace the boot sector — it either prevents writing to it or it immediately re-infects it.
Ping-Pong. A is extinct but the hard-disk variants can still appear.
References
- Ping Pong. McAfee (1998). Retrieved on June 6, 2006.
- Virus Descriptions : Ping-Pong. F-Secure. Retrieved on June 6, 2006.
- Wells, J. (1996). Virus Timeline. IBM. Retrieved on June 6, 2006.
- SmartDefense Research Center. Zone Labs (2002). Retrieved on June 6, 2006.
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