Computer Viruses
Computer Crimes
Convicted Computer Criminals
History
Timeline of computer viruses
Computer viruses have been around since the 1950's, what many people still don't know about computer viruses, are how they are created, the history, and how they are used.
Most of the population believe that all computer viruses are malicious and their only intent is to harm everyone's computer to the point of no return. But what alot of people don't know is that the first structure complete computer virus was created for Apple computers and was named Elk Cloner. It was created by a 15 year old high school student, named Rich Skrenta. The virus was created so when the computer booted from an infected floppy, a copy would automatically start. When an uninfected floppy was accessed, the virus would then replicate itself and copy from floppy to floppy. Elk Cloner did not cause harm, but if a disk didn't have the original DOS image, it overwrote its reserved tracks regardless of the contents.
1971: The Creeper Virus, an experimental self-replicating program, was written by BBN Technologies, only affected TENEX operating systems. Was accessible through the ARPANET.
1974: The Wabbit virus, replicated itself on a computer until it clogs the sytem, reducing performance, and finally crashing the system.
1975: ANIMAL was created by John Walker for Univac 1108. ANIMAL would ask a series of questions to guess the type of animal that the user was thinking of, while a different program PERVADE would copy itself. The program was written to avoid damage or overloading of systems. It was eventually halted by an OS upgrade and change of format.
1980: Jurgen Kraus wrote a master thesis on Selbstreproduktion bei Programmen(self-reproduction of programs)
1981: Elk Cloner was written for Apple and created by Richard Skrenta. Apple 2 was vulnerable because of limited storage of the OS on a floppy disk. Elk Cloner combined with public ignorance about viruses and malware, led to Elk Cloner being responsible for the first large-scale computer virus outbreak in history.
1983: The term "virus" was given by Frederick Cohen in describing the self-replicating computer programs.
1984: Ken Thompson publishes "Reflections on Trusting Trust", a paper which describes what viruses can do, and about being inserted into a program's object code.
1986: The brain boot sector virus is released. It was the first IBM PC compatible virus, and the program responsible for the first IBM epidemic.
1987: appearance of the Vienna Virus, it was neutralized. First time in IBM history it was neutralized.
1988: Festering Hate Apple ProDos virus spreads from pirate BBS systems and starts infecting the mainstream networks.
1989: Ghostball, the first multipartite virus, was discovered by Friorick Skulason.
1990: Mark Washburn working on the Vienna and Cascade viruses with Ralf Burger, creating the first family of polymorphic viurs; The Chameleon family.
1993: Leandro & Kelly and Freddy Krueger spread quickly due to popularity of BBS and shareware distribution.
1995: first Macro virus, called Concept attacked MS word docs.
1996: Ply-DOS 16-bit complicated polymorphic virus appeared with built-in permutation engine.
1998: first version ofr CIH virus.
1999: Happy99 worm attached to emails.
2000: ILOVEYOu worm appears, causing 5.5 to 10 billion dollars in damage.
2001: Anna Kournikova virus hits email servers hard by sending email contacts to MS outlook.
2002: Beast affects all Windows OS.
2003: SQL slammer worm released.
2004: MyDoom released.
2005: Sammy XSS worm becomes fastest spreading virus.
2006: Nyxem worm is discovered.
2007: Storm worm identified as fastest spreading email spamming threat.
2008: Mocmex is a trojan, found in a digital photo frame.
2009: July 2009 cyber attacks
2010: Microsoft announced that a BSoD problem on some windows machines was triggered by a batch of Patch Tuesday updaes that was caused by the Alureon trojan.
No Address
Thank You
Virus Protection
How a computer virus works
Site Developer