Ambulance (computer virus)

Ambulance or Ambulance Car is a computer virus that infected computers running a DOS operating system in June 1990. It was discovered in Germany.[1]

Ambulance
AliasesRedX
TypeVirus
IsolationJune,1990
Point of originGermany
Operating system(s) affectedDOS
Filesize796 bytes

Description
Animation of the payload

Ambulance does not become memory resident. It infects only one .COM file in any given directory, but not the first one. Thus, there must be at least two .COM files in a directory for it to spread.

When an infected file is executed, an ASCII art ambulance can be seen moving across the screen, a siren starts to sound, and it displays an alert message such as: BOOM! It is not a deliberately destructive virus; it simply spreads itself around and shows off its payload once in a while.[2] In certain iterations of the virus, the ambulance will only appear once per boot-up.[3]

Variants

These are just some of many variants detected:

  • Ambulance Car-B
  • RedX-Any
  • Ambulance.793
  • Ambulance.793.A
  • Ambulance.795
  • Ambulance.796A[4]

See also

References
  1. "Ambulance Car Virus". 1996 Virus-Test-Center, University of Hamburg. Archived from the original on 10 June 2007. Retrieved 17 February 2013.
  2. "AMBULANCE.796A - Threat Encyclopedia". www.trendmicro.com. Retrieved 2021-01-10.
  3. "Ambulance Car Virus". agn-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de. Archived from the original on 2007-06-10. Retrieved 2021-01-12.
  4. "Virus.DOS.Ambulance.796.a". Virus List. Archived from the original on 10 June 2015. Retrieved 18 February 2013.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.