The Ping-Pong virus (also called Boot, Bouncing Ball, Bouncing Dot, Italian, Italian-A or VeraCruz) is a boot sector virus discovered on March 1, 1988 at the University of Turin in Italy. The virus would become active if a disk access is made exactly on the half hour and start to show a small “ball” bouncing around the screen in both text mode (the ASCII bullet character “•”) and graphical mode.