Ping Pong Virus

What Does Ping Pong Virus Mean?

The Ping-pong virus is a boot sector virus that infects the DOS. It was discovered at the University of Turin (Italy) in 1988. A system corrupted by this virus has a white spot bouncing across the screen, touching all corners.

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The Ping-pong virus is also known as Bouncing Ball, VerCruz, Italian A or Bouncing dot.

Techopedia Explains Ping Pong Virus

The Ping-pong virus is (was) a virus commonly detected in DOS. For a while, it was one of the most widespread boot sector viruses. The virus residing in memory becomes active when the disk is accessed; a tiny spot bouncing all over the screen then appears. Intel 286-based machines have a high possibility of crashing upon the appearance of the bouncing ball.

The Ping-pong virus existed mainly in three forms: Ping-Pong.A, Ping-Pong.B and Ping-Pong.C. The first form only infects floppy drives, whereas the last two both infect the boot sector of a hard disk. Although Ping-pong.A is no longer thought to be active, the two other variants are still active, though they are obviously not significant threats given that their age and that they targeted DOS.

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Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…