Summary

IBM Germany distributed a number of infected original diskettes in January 1996. The program in question was "VoiceType Vokabular". It was shipped on permanently write-protected floppies, which were infected with a boot sector virus.

Since this virus is pretty new, there's still some confusion about the name. F-Secure anti-virus products starting from F-PROT 2.21 detect it as 'Newboot_1', but the CARO name has been decided to be 'Quandary'. Other names for this virus are Parity.Boot.Enc and IHC.

The virus itself is very simple, basic boot sector virus. The only unusual thing about it is that it infects the MBR of all hard drives connected to a system, including the non-bootable slave drives.

[Analysis: Mikko Hypponen, F-Secure]