The first computer viruses The Creeper virus was first detected on ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet, in the early 1970s. Creeper was an experimental self-replicating program written by Bob Thomas at BBN Technologies in 1971 . Creeper used the ARPANET to infect DEC PDP-10 computers running the TENEX operating system. Creeper gained access via the ARPANET and copied itself to the remote system where the message, Im the creeper, catch me if you can! was displayed. The Reaper program was created to delete Creeper. In 1982, a program called Elk Cloner was the first personal computer virus to appear in the wild—that is, outside the single computer or lab where it was created. Written in 1981 by Richard Skrenta, it attached itself to the Apple DOS 3.3 operating system and spread via floppy disk. This virus, created as a practical joke when Skrenta was still in high school, was injected in a game on a floppy disk. On its 50th use the Elk Cloner virus would be activated, infecting the personal computer and displaying a short poem beginning Elk Cloner: The program with a personality. In 1984 Fred Cohen from the University of Southern California wrote his paper Computer Viruses – Theory and Experiments. It was the first paper to explicitly call a self-reproducing program a virus, a term introduced by Cohens mentor Leonard Adleman. In 1987, Fred Cohen published a demonstration that there is no algorithm that can perfectly detect all possible viruses. Fred Cohens theoretical compression virus was an example of a virus which was not malware, but was putatively benevolent. However, antivirus professionals do not accept the concept of benevolent viruses, as any desired function can be implemented without involving a virus (automatic compression, for instance, is available under the Windows operating system at the choice of the user). Any virus will by definition make unauthorised changes to a computer, which is undesirable even if no damage is done or intended. On page one of Dr Solomons Virus Encyclopaedia, the undesirability of viruses, even those that do nothing but reproduce, is thoroughly explained. An article that describes useful virus functionalities was published by J. B. Gunn under the title Use of virus functions to provide a virtual APL interpreter under user control in 1984. The first IBM PC virus in the wild was a boot sector virus dubbed (c)Brain, created in 1986 by the Farooq Alvi Brothers in Lahore, Pakistan, reportedly to deter piracy of the software they had written. The first virus to specifically target Microsoft Windows, WinVir was discovered in April 1992, two years after the release of Windows 3.0. The virus did not contain any Windows APIcalls, instead relying on DOS interrupts. A few years later, in February 1996, Australian hackers from the virus-writing crew Boza created the VLAD virus, which was the first known virus to target Windows 95. In late 1997 the encrypted, memory-resident stealth virus Win32.Cabanas was released—the first known virus that targeted Windows NT (it was also able to infect Windows 3.0 and Windows 9x hosts). Even home computers were affected by viruses. The first one to appear on the Commodore Amiga was a boot sector virus called SCA virus, which was detected in November 1987.
Posted on: Fri, 08 Aug 2014 02:48:09 +0000