HISTORY OF COMPUTER VIRUS

Traditional computer viruses were first widely seen in the late 1980s, and they came about because of several factors. The first factor was the spread of personal computers (PCs). Prior to the 1980s, home computers were nearly non-existent or they were toys. Real computers were rare, and they were locked away for use by "experts." During the 1980s, real computers started to spread to businesses and homes because of the popularity of the IBM PC (released in 1982) and the Apple Macintosh (released in 1984). By the late 1980s, PCs were widespread in businesses, homes and college campuses.
The second factor was the use of computer bulletin boards. People could dial up a bulletin board with a modem and download programs of all types. Games were extremely popular, and so were simple word processors, spreadsheets, etc. Bulletin boards led to the precursor of the virus known as the Trojan horse. A Trojan horse is a program that sounds really cool when you read about it. So you download it. When you run the program, however, it does something uncool like erasing your disk. So you think you are getting a neat game but it wipes out your system. Trojan horses only hit a small number of people because they are discovered quickly. Either the bulletin board owner would erase the file from the system or people would send out messages to warn one another.
The third factor that led to the creation of viruses was the floppy disk. In the 1980s, programs were small, and you could fit the operating system, a word processor (plus several other programs) and some documents onto a floppy disk or two. Many computers did not have hard disks, so you would turn on your machine and it would load the operating system and everything else off of the floppy disk.

 

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1949 Theories for self-replicating programs are first developed.

1981 Apple Viruses 1, 2, and 3 are some of the first viruses "in the wild" or public domain. Found on the Apple II operating system, the viruses spread through Texas A&M via pirated computer games.

1983 Fred Cohen, while working on his dissertation, formally defines a computer virus as "a computer program that can affect other computer programs by modifying them in such a way as to include a (possibly evolved) copy of itself". The name 'virus' was thought of by Len Adleman.

1986 "Brain" & "PC-Write Trojan": The common story is that two brothers from Pakistan named Basit and Amjad analyzed the boot sector of a floppy disk and developed a method of infecting it with a virus dubbed "Brain" (the origin is generally accepted but not absolute). Because it spread widely on the popular MS-DOS PC system this is typically called the first computer virus; even though it was predated by Cohen's experiments and the Apple II virus. That same year the first PC-based Trojan was released in the form of the popular shareware program PC-Write.

1987 "Stoned" is the first virus to infect the master boot record preventing it from starting up.

1988 One of the most common viruses, "Jerusalem", is unleashed. Activated every Friday the 13th, the virus affects both .EXE and .COM files and deletes any programs run on that day. An Indonesian programmer releases the first anti-virus software for the brain virus. The "Internet Worm" is released and crashed 5000 computers.

1989 IBM releases the first commercial anti-virus products. Intensive anti-virus research commences. The "Dark Avenger" virus appears.

1990 Symantec launches Norton Antivirus, one of the first anti-virus programs developed by a large company. Bulletin Boards (BBS) become a common way for virus writers to share code.

1991 "Tequila" is the first widespread polymorphic virus found in the wild. Polymorphic viruses make detection difficult for virus scanners by changing their appearance with each new infection. Virus construction kits can be downloaded from virus bulletin boards enabling almost anyone to write a virus. 9% in early 1991 reported they had experienced a virus attack. By the end of the year that figure increased to 63%.

1992 1300 viruses are in existence, an increase of 420% from December of 1990. The Michelangelo scare predicts 5 million computers will crash on March 6. Only 5,000-10,000 actually go down.

1994 Good Times email hoax tears through the computer community. The hoax warns of a malicious virus that will erase an entire hard drive just by opening an email with the subject line "Good Times". Though disproved, the hoax resurfaces every six to twelve months. In England, the writer if the "Pathogen" virus is found by Scotland Yard and sentenced to 18 months in jail. This is the first prosecution.

1995 The "Concept" macro virus appears. Written in Microsoft's WordBasic it can run on PCs and Macs running Microsoft Word. Being so easy to write, macro viruses become extensively widespread.

1998 Currently harmless and yet to be found in the wild, StrangeBrew is the first virus to infect Java files. The virus modifies CLASS files to contain a copy of itself within the middle of the file's code and to begin execution from the virus section.

1999 The Melissa virus, W97M/Melissa, executes a macro in a document attached to an email, which forwards the document to 50 people in the user's Outlook address book. The virus also infects other Word documents and subsequently mails them out as attachments. Melissa spread faster than any other previous virus and infected hundreds of thousands of PCs. The "Chernobyl" virus hit in April making the hard drive inaccessible causing wide spread damage. Tristate is the first multi-program macro virus; it infects Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. Bubbleboy is the first worm that would activate when a user simply opened and E-mail message in Microsoft Outlook (or previewed the message in Outlook Express). No attachment is necessary. Bubbleboy was the proof of concept; Kak spread widely using this technique.

2000 The "Love Bug", also known as the "ILoveYou" and "Love Letter" virus, sends itself out via Outlook, much like Melissa. From the Philippines, the virus comes as a VBS attachment and deletes files, including MP3, MP2, and JPG. It also sends usernames and passwords to the virus' author. "Love Letter" spread over the US and Europe in 6 hours and infected 2.5 million PCs causing an estimated $8.7 billion in damage. "W97M.Resume.A", a new variation of the "Melissa" virus, is determined to be in the wild. The "resume" virus acts much like "Melissa", using a Word macro to infect Outlook and spread itself. The "Stages" virus, disguised as a joke email about the stages of life, spreads across the Internet. Unlike previous viruses, "Stages" is hidden in an attachment with a false ".txt" extension, making it easier to lure recipients into opening it. Until now, it has generally been safe to assume the text files are safe. August 2000 saw the first Trojan developed for the Palm PDA. Called "Liberty" and developed by Aaron Ardiri the co-developer of the Palm Game Boy emulator Liberty, the Trojan was developed as an uninstall program and was distributed to a few people to help foil those who would steal the actual software. When it was accidentally released to the wider public Ardiri helped contains its spread.

2001 The Anna Kournikova virus, also known as VBS/SST, which masquerades as a picture of Tennis Star Anna Kournikova, operates in a similar manner to Melissa and The Love Bug. It spreads by sending copies of itself to the entire address book in Microsoft Outlook. It is believed that this virus was created with a so-called virus creation kit, a program which can enable even a novice programmer to create these malicious programs. In May, the HomePage email virus hit no more than 10,000 users of Microsoft Outlook. When opened, the virus redirected users to sexually explicit Web pages. Technically known as VBSWG.X, the virus spread quickly through Asia and Europe, but was mostly prevented in the U.S. because of lessons learned in earlier time zones. The author of the virus is said to live in Argentina, and have authored the Kournikova virus earlier in the year. The Code Red I and II worms attacked computer networks in July and August. According to Computer Economics they affected over 700,000 computers and caused upwards of 2 billion in damages. A worm spreads through external and (then) internal computer networks, as opposed to a virus which infects computers via email and certain websites. Code Red took advantage of a vulnerability in Microsoft's Windows

2000 and Windows NT server software. Microsoft developed a patch to protect networks against the worm, and admits that they too were attacked. Other major companies affected include AT&T, and the AP.

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