Summary

The Ping-Pong virus (also called "Bouncing Ball" or "Italian") was probably the most common and best known boot sector virus for a while, although the Stoned virus now outnumbers it.

Additional Details

An infected diskette will contain 1K in "bad clusters".

When this virus activates, a small "ball" starts bouncing around the screen, but in most cases no serious damage occurs.

There is one small bug in the virus code, which causes a crash on '286 machines (and also V20, '386 and '486). The reason is that the author used the "MOV CS,AX" instruction, which only exists on '88 and '86 processors.

VARIANT:

Typo

This variant appeared in Israel. There the effect of the virus has been drastically changed. Instead of displaying a bouncing ball, the virus introduces typing errors in all text going out to the printer.