What is Ghostball Virus?
The Ghostball virus is the first known multipartite virus. It is an infecting file virus that can infect COM files and disk boot sectors.
The Ghostball virus was written based on code from two different viruses. The code that infects the COM files is inspired by a modified version of the Vienna virus. The boot sector infecting part of the virus comes from the ping-pong virus. Ghostballs was discovered in 1989 by Fridrik Skulason from Iceland.
Ghostball infects generic COM files and hard drive boot sectors on a computer. The virus targets the hard drive boot sector by putting viral code on it. Ghostball virus is activated whenever an infected file is executed. Then the virus actively searches the directory for other uninfected COM files in order to infect them. The Ghostball virus can be removed by deleting all infected COM files.
Symptoms of a Ghostball virus attack on a computer include an increase in the size of infected files by 2,351 bytes. Symptoms are similar to those of the ping pong virus, which includes accidental file corruption and the infamous bouncing ball effect of the ping pong virus. Ghostball infected files can also display the following content:
GhostBalls, Product of Iceland Copyright © 1989, 4418 and 5F10 MSDOS 3.2 '.
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