Ping-Pong (computer virus)
boot sector computer virus
The Ping-Pong virus (also called Boot, Bouncing Ball, Bouncing Dot, Italian, Italian-A or VeraCruz) is a boot sector virus discovered on March 1, 1988, at the Politecnico di Torino (Turin Polytechnic University) in Italy. 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 a bad cluster, MS-DOS will avoid overwriting it. It infects disks on every active drive and will even infect non-bootable partitions 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 (the ASCII bullet 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.
“Ping-Pong (computer virus)” enters the record as boot sector computer virus. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Ping-Pong, computer and virus can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3905195. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1988.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ping-Pong (computer virus)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.