Warsaw-850 Virus

Virus Name: Warsaw-850 Aliases: Warsaw V Status: New Discovered: August, 1993 Symptoms: .COM file growth; .COM file corruption; unexpected system reboots Origin: Poland Eff Length: 850 Bytes Type Code: PONCK - Parasitic & Overwriting Non-Resident .COM Infector Detection Method: ViruScan, F-Prot, AVTK, Sweep, IBMAV, NAV, NAVDX, VAlert, NShld, AVTK/N, NProt, Sweep/N, IBMAV/N, NAV/N Removal Instructions: Delete infected files General Comments: The Warsaw-850 virus was received in August, 1993. It is originally from Poland. Warsaw-850 is a non-resident, direct action infector of .COM programs, including COMMAND.COM. It infects files in both a parasitic and overwriting manner. When a program infected with the Warsaw-850 virus is executed, this virus will infect one .COM file located in the current directory. If the resulting infection is parasitic, the newly infected file will have a file length increase of 850 bytes with the virus being located at the end of the file. If the resulting infection is overwriting, the first 850 bytes of the host program will have been overwritten by the virus, and no file length increase will have occurred. In both cases, the program's date and time in the DOS disk directory listing will not have been altered. The following text strings can be found within the viral code in all Warsaw-850 infected programs: "*.COM" "Warsaw - virus 1990" "????????COM" "\QBASIC S\GAMES\STELLAR7" Programs which have been infected in an overwriting manner will not function properly, and execution of these files will frequently result in the system being rebooted.