The Quox virus is a reasonably simple diskette and Master Boot Record
infector. It is only able to infect a hard disk when you try to boot
the machine from an infected diskette. At this time Quox infects
the Main Boot Record, and after that it will go resident to high
DOS memory during every boot-up from the hard disk.
Once Quox gets resident to memory, it will infect practicly all
non-writeprotected diskettes used in the machine. Quox-virus is also a
stealth virus - if you try to examine an infected boot record, it will
show you the original clean one instead.
Quox-virus has no particular payload and no text strings. It does not
activate in any way, but it will corrupt some diskettes seriously. The
damage might not be visible as long as the virus is resident in memory
because of the stealth. When infected diskettes are used in a clean
machine, they will typically be unreadable and, due a bug in DOS, may
even crash the machine.
Virus was found in Thailand in July of 1992. Virus was named to be
"Quox" at the IBM High Integrity Labs because "there was no obvious good
name, and we didn't have very many viruses starting in 'Q'", David Chess
from IBM commented.
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