Malware profile by Moritz Jeremic and Siebo Vogel
| Virus | Worm | Trojan | Ransomware | Botnet | Other |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ✔️ |
- Year: 1992 [1]
- Author: Unknown (we couldn’t find a source)
- Language: Assembly [2]
- Infections: “The most prevalent virus in Germany up to 1996”[3]
- Damage: Unknown (we couldn’t find a source) or low [4]
Parity_Boot.B infects the boot records of diskettes and the Master Boot Records of hard disks. As a typical boot sector virus, Parity_Boot.B can infect hard disks only during a diskette boot. The virus reserves one kilobyte of conventional memory for itself and infects all non-write- protected diskettes used in an infected computer.
From time to time, infected systems hang and display the following message:
"PARITY CHECK"
Total system and available free memory, as indicated by the DOS CHKDSK, decreases by 1,024 bytes.
Methods of Infection
The only way to infect a computer with an MBR/Boot Sector infector is to attempt to boot from an infected floppy diskette. The boot sector of the diskette has the code to determine if the diskette is bootable, and to display the "Non-system disk or disk error" message. It is this code that harbors the infection. By the time the non-system disk error message comes up, the infection has occurred.
Once the virus is executed, it will infect the hard drive's MBR and may become memory resident. With every subsequent boot, the virus will be loaded into memory and will attempt to infect floppy diskettes accessed by the machine. [5]