Ambulance or Ambulance Car is a

computer virus A computer virus is a type of computer program that, when executed, replicates itself by modifying other computer programs and inserting its own code. If this replication succeeds, the affected areas are then said to be "infected" with a compu ...

that infected computers running a

DOS DOS is shorthand for the MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS family of operating systems. DOS may also refer to: Computing * Data over signalling (DoS), multiplexing data onto a signalling channel * Denial-of-service attack (DoS), an attack on a communicat ...

operating system in June 1990. It was discovered in

Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG),, is a country in Central Europe. It is the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany lies between the Baltic and North Sea to the north and the Alps to the sou ...

Description

Ambulance does not become

memory resident A terminate-and-stay-resident program (commonly TSR) is a computer program running under DOS that uses a system call to return control to DOS as though it has finished, but remains in computer memory so it can be reactivated later. This technique ...

. It infects only one

.COM The domain name .com is a top-level domain (TLD) in the Domain Name System (DNS) of the Internet. Added at the beginning of 1985, its name is derived from the word ''commercial'', indicating its original intended purpose for domains registere ...

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 ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable (from a total of 128) character (computing), characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 an ...

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. In certain iterations of the virus, the ambulance will only appear once per

boot-up In computing, booting is the process of starting a computer as initiated via hardware such as a button or by a software command. After it is switched on, a computer's central processing unit (CPU) has no software in its main memory, so some ...

Variants

These are just some of many variants detected: * Ambulance Car-B * RedX-Any * Ambulance.793 * Ambulance.793.A * Ambulance.795 * Ambulance.796A

References

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Description

Variants

See also

References

External links