There, it would infect the main computer and any other floppy disks inserted into it, so it could spread. Elk Cloner: The program with a personality It will get on all your disks It will infiltrate your chips Yes, it's Cloner! Sounds pretty scary, right? Well, while it was certainly annoying, it was actually designed to be fairly harmless.
It was crafted as a prank by future entrepreneur Rich Skrenta as a year-old high schooler, and all you really had to do was reboot the computer to continue using it as normal.
Although apparently he had a habit of doing these kinds of things, as his friends soon learned to stop trading floppy disks with him.
With the infection property, a virus can spread throughout a computer system or network using the authorizations of every user using it to infect their programs. Every program that gets infected may also act as a virus and thus the infection grows.
While it took advantage of an exploit in the Microsoft operating system, it was never really designed to be a virus. Created by two brothers, Basit Farooq Alvi and Amjad Farooq Alvi, Brain was designed to protect their medical software from being pirated. They even had a message in the code that included their address and phone numbers so they could fix any infected machines. And yet, because the floppy it came on was so frequently stolen, they were astonished to find themselves swamped with requests to remove Brain from a lot of infected devices.
Viruses really started to become a problem in the late s, as computers became more commonplace and people began to really experiment with the kind of shenanigans they could get into with malicious code. One of the products of this experimental age was the Vienna virus, which was a fairly harmful beast: when it infected a device, it would corrupt data and destroy files, seemingly for no reason other than to cause problems and grief for people running DOS devices.
It was just one of many such viruses in this time, but it was problematic enough that in , a man named Brend Fix was tasked by Rolf Burger, a fellow computer scientist and author, to find a way to neutralize it. Thankfully, through some hard work, Brent Fix was able to live up to his last name and fix the issue, creating the very first dedicated antivirus software , which was able to detect and destroy the Vienna virus before it could cause any damage. Still, soon afterwards, others would be inspired and start designing their own programs to stop viruses, starting a game of cat and mouse between rival groups of hackers that has continued to this very day.
Up until this point, viruses only really existed for the entertainment of those who made them. They were purely a hobby, and the idea of actually making money off malicious software was hypothetical at best. If only all ransomware stories had such nice endings. Computers were luxury items, and they were usually only found in universities, businesses, and the homes of hobbyists and the elite. That all changed in when the Michelangelo virus was unleashed onto the world.
The Michelangelo virus was a destructive worm that would spread onto any floppy disk inserted into the computer, while remaining dormant and undetectable. But then on the titular painter's birthday, March 6th, it would activate and absolutely ruin any computer infected with it.
While there was nothing especially unique about the Michelangelo virus, it was soon discovered that a few computer and software manufacturers accidentally shipped products with Michelangelo pre-installed onto them.
The actual number of infected computers was never more than 20, But John McAfee, founder of McAfee antivirus and… interesting fellow, made the expert claim that hundreds of thousands, if not millions of machines were infected. Which may have been a motivating factor in him riling up the public. The virus, which was also the first stealth virus, contained a hidden copyright message, but did not actually corrupt any data.
The introduction of reliable, speedy broadband networks early in the 21st century changed the way malware was transmitted. No longer confined to floppy disks or company networks, malware was now able to spread very quickly via email, via popular websites or even directly over the Internet. As a result, modern malware began to take shape. The threat landscape became a mixed environment shared by viruses, worms and Trojans—hence the name "malware" as an umbrella term for malicious software.
One of the most serious epidemics of this new era was the LoveLetter, which appeared on May 4, As Securelist notes, it followed the pattern of earlier email viruses of the time, but unlike the macro viruses that had dominated the threat landscape since , it didn't take the form of an infected Word document, but arrived as a VBS file.
It was simple and straightforward, and since users hadn't learned to be suspicious of unsolicited emails, it worked. Since the message often came to new victims from someone familiar, they were more likely to open it, making ILOVEYOU a proof-of-concept for the effectiveness of social engineering.
The Code Red worm was a "file less" worm—it existed only in memory and made no attempt to infect files on the system. Taking advantage of a flaw in the Microsoft Internet Information Server, the fast-replicating worm wreaked havoc by manipulating the protocols that allow computers to communicate and spread globally in just hours.
Eventually, as noted in Scientific American , compromised machines were used to launch a distributed denial of service attack on the Whitehouse. One of the most recent of the major viruses came out in , Heartbleed burst onto the scene and put servers across the Internet at risk. Many of his predictions have come to pass.
This was the first artistic impression of how computer viruses could compete with the legitimate system for resources. In the world had to deal with Wabbit or Rabbit, a highly infectious program which was capable of rapid and far-reaching self-replication. This would eventually clog the system to the extent that it would no longer perform as expected.
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