Wisconsin Virus

Virus Name: Wisconsin Aliases: Death To Pascal V Status: Rare Discovered: September, 1990 Symptoms: .COM growth; message; write protect Errors; .PAS files disappear; file date/time changes Origin: Wisconsin, United States Eff Length: 825 Bytes Type Code: PNC - Parasitic Non-Resident .COM Infector Detection Method: ViruScan, AVTK, F-Prot, NAV, Sweep, IBMAV, NAVDX, VAlert, PCScan, ChAV, NShld, LProt, Sweep/N, Innoc, NProt, AVTK/N, NAV/N, IBMAV/N Removal Instructions: Delete infected files General Comments: The Wisconsin virus was received in September, 1990. The origin of the sample was Wisconsin, which is where its name came from. It is also reported to have been isolated at about this same time in California. Wisconsin is a non-resident infector of .COM files, but it does not infect COMMAND.COM. When a program infected with the Wisconsin virus is executed, the virus will alter the date and time of the program being executed to the current system date and time. The Wisconsin virus will then infect one other .COM file in the current directory. Infected files will increase in length by 825 bytes, with the viral code located at the beginning of the file. If an attempt is made to execute a program infected with the Wisconsin virus from a write-protected diskette, a write protect error will occur. This virus does not intercept this error. Infected programs may display the following message: "Death to Pascal." When this message is displayed, any .PAS files located in the current directory will be deleted. This message cannot be seen in infected files as it is encrypted.