The Ping-Pong virus (also called Boot, Bouncing Ball, Bouncing Dot, Italian, Italian-A or VeraCruz) is a

boot sector virus A computer virus is a type of computer program that, when executed, replicates itself by modifying other computer programs and inserting its own code. If this replication succeeds, the affected areas are then said to be "infected" with a comput ...

discovered on March 1, 1988, at the ''

Politecnico di Torino The Polytechnic University of Turin ( it, Politecnico di Torino) is the oldest Italian public technical university. The university offers several courses in the fields of Engineering, Architecture, Urban Planning and Industrial Design, and is co ...

'' (Turin Polytechnic University) in

Italy Italy ( it, Italia ), officially the Italian Republic, ) or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern Europe. It is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical re ...

. It was likely the most common and best known boot sector virus until outnumbered by the Stoned virus.

Replication method

Computers could be contaminated by an infected diskette, showing up as a 1 KB bad cluster (the last one on the disk, used by the virus to store the original boot sector) to most disk checking programs. Due to being labelled as bad cluster,

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few ope ...

will avoid overwriting it. It infects disks on every active drive and will even infect non-bootable

partition Partition may refer to: Computing Hardware * Disk partitioning, the division of a hard disk drive * Memory partition, a subdivision of a computer's memory, usually for use by a single job Software * Partition (database), the division of a ...

s on the hard disk. 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 Text mode is a computer display mode in which content is internally represented on a computer screen in terms of characters rather than individual pixels. Typically, the screen consists of a uniform rectangular grid of ''character cells'', each ...

(the

ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because of ...

bullet A bullet is a kinetic projectile, a component of firearm ammunition that is shot from a gun barrel. Bullets are made of a variety of materials, such as copper, lead, steel, polymer, rubber and even wax. Bullets are made in various shapes and co ...

character "•") and graphical mode. No serious damage is incurred 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. 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 disk A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, or a diskette) is an obsolescent type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined w ...

s. Later variants of this virus such as Ping-Pong.B and Ping-Pong.C also infect the hard disk boot sector as well. While 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

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Ping-Pong Virus Boot viruses Hacking in the 1980s