Slashdot Mirror
20th Anniversary Of Computer Viruses Commemorated
DoraLives writes "Our good friends at the BBC are celebrating the 20th anniversary of the computer virus. So, viruses are no longer teenagers and are now entering adulthood, as 'there are almost 60,000 viruses in existence and they have gone from being a nuisance to a permanent menace.' What wonders shall there be to come, as these marvelous bits of code continue to grow and multiply?" We ran a recent BBC-authored story on the psychology of virus writers.
Maybe I'm just a grumpy old curmudgeon, but I don't see what there is to celebrate here, or what is about these little bits of code that's so "marvelous".
Their mother and I have put up with enough!
We'd like to thank the Academy, the little people and most of all Microsoft for making all this possible. Here's to another 20 good years.
[applause]
Trolling is a art,
support@microsoft.comp ort@microsoft.com
support@microsoft.com
sup
They let it happen; now, they're sending it to your doorstep.
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
opening up and unsecuring all the ports on my machine!
Whats scary is that this article is right next after one that says Microsoft Moving Into Chip Design. Is this an omen of some sorts?
Disturbing. Very disturbing.
Just you wait, there's more in store. Except it seems now that virus authors have major financial backing (spammers) and are establishing a sophisticated zombie infrastructure running on Windows machines that will cause years of serious trouble. Time to start seriously prosecuting these a$$holes (spammers, virus authors, or Microsoft... you decide!)
This slashdot what really are the odds that the article been read by anyone?
Anyone old enough to know what I'm talking about?
Twenty one is the legal drinking age lat time I checked. But...
It represents a full generation. e.g. One cadre of people have grown up for their whole lives in contact with both the realities of the thing and the meme.
This might inicate both better virus and better defenses.
It also might just be a slow day for the news.
"Something wonderful has happened...Your Amiga is alive!"
;)
Good ol' days....
I remember about 5 or 6 years ago, back when I last used AntiVirus software (I've since then stopped due to degraded PC performance, I don't accept email attachments or open ambiguous executables and I also hit windowsupdate daily and have never had any issues) there was claimed to be over 50,000 virii known to McAfee.
Has the growth slowed down or something?
If anything I thought there would be much more today with the staggering amount of computer users (and crackers/hackers/elite people whatever you wan't to call them).
Or is this a good sign? Maybe since more and more people use AV software the authors just figure its not as easy anymore?
Put enough people into a system and it starts to behave like an organic system rather than individuals each doing their thing.
Viruses, worms, trojans are way past the point of being expressions of individualistic derangement.
They represent the nasty side of the biology of the Net: the fact that any simulated or real ecosystem produces more parasites than non-parasites, and that non-parasites have to spend a significant amount of energy fighting off the bugs.
Two decades is not significant in itself, but it should be a stark warning that viruses are not going to go away, that the Net is turning "wild", and that we need something other than daily antivirus updates to keep our systems safe.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Hmm, I just thought of something when looking at the top 2 stories... Why aren't there any XBox viruses? It seems like a prime target for worms, with internet connectivity via XBox Live, a well-published interface for firmware hacking via software, a homogenous monoculture of both hardware and software, not to mention probably dozens of well-known vulnerabilities from its use of Windows and DirectX alone. Is there anything special about the XBox that is protecting it more than PCs from a plague of viruses?
-3Suns
~~~~
The Revolution will be Slashdotted
Y2K Dogbert quote: because it's "a big, round number... biigg and rouunndd...". Mwahahahaa!
You shall see a cow on the roof of a cotton house.
"Time to start seriously prosecuting these a$$holes (spammers, virus authors, or Microsoft... you decide!)"
I'd like that technology they have in the movies that causes computers to explode. Send me a virus, will you? Take that! Trojan me? BOOM!
"there are almost 60,000 viruses in existence"
Why do journalists insist on sticking poorly researched figures in a writeup? Do they think that this somehow makes it all seem more credible? This number is clearly just a count from a virus checker's definition file summary. I bet they failed to include or even comprehend the fact that viruses are not a Windows only thing - heck, game instructions for the Amiga would insist that you hard booted your machine to get rid of potentially evil RAM content type stuff.
I really don't see how you celebrate the creation of the first virus. It's like saying "Woo hoo, my PC has been fried, and I lost my long-worked on school report." It should be remembered, not celebrated, I guess their are some sado-masochistic PC owners who enjoy their PC getting damaged, and their work lost.
The last time a virus inconvenienced me was back when I brought an ex-display A5000 with a collection of 200 viruses on it (according to the virus checker - never did get them all I think).
However, I get haraased by viruses on a daily basis... as part of my free geek tech support that people assume I run. In my opinion I wish viruses would totally trash hard disks as then I could just tell people to buy a Mac or install Linux for them instead rather than being forced to clean up - a long and painful process on Windows.
I don't suffer from a virus menace, I suffer from a stupid user menace, made worse by the fact that they don't knoe enough not to choose a crippled operating system.
Beep beep.
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
Well despite the fact that they are quite malicious, some of those viruses are pretty clever.
Think about it. This really is something to celebrate.
Next year the viruses can legally drink.
A drunken virus should be much easier to thwack.
This equates to artificially intelligent versions of viruses, complete with very sophisticated capabilities. A script kiddies delight. Of course, properly written, it could be dangerous to play with, taking out a few script kiddy systems in the process.
(imagine demonic voices coming out of a system - "Who dares summon me?")
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Anyone old enough to know what I'm talking about?
Yes. I am old enough to know what you are talking about.
However, that doesn't mean I do know what you are talking about.
Now the point of my story - My friend looked into exactly what Norton was checking for, and it turns out that almost half of the viruses it was checking for were actually Microsoft Word macros. Now, I don't know that much about Word macros, but I'm assuming that most of the ones that would mess up a Windows box are different from those that would mess up an OS X box. So before anyone says that virus only show up for windows because it is the most popular, also realize that Micro$oft can't even write a secure word processor.
This message is encrypted with Quad ROT-13 to protect the author's copyright under the DMCA.
Nowadays, with the advent of MacOSX (chugging along, thanks) and Linux, these little critters are a thing of the past....
Oh! You mean that they aren't exctinct like the ill-fated dinosaucers!?!? Geez! You mean they only run on MS Windows! You kidding? And to help them procreate and run rampant like in the ancient days, uncle Bill leaves the ports open??? Good 'ncle Bill!
PS: before the hordes of trolls and uninformed bots advocating the alleged security-via-obscurity of MacOSX come in by the legion, please do a google and a slashdot search (yes it even was published here) on PowerPC shell-codes, thank you. After having read and thouroughly understood the ample PDF's, come back and dare to post.
SPOILER: the CS library next to you surely has a publicily available wrinkled PowerPC assembly and arch book for you, go read them.
"If it doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger... something like that."
Woo Hoo! Let's hear it for SARS and Ebola.
hehe. I know I haven't read the article yet.
How could I say to men: "Speak louder, shout! For I am deaf!"? -Ludwig van Beethoven
Wait for it..
Viri! Virii! Viruses! Viren! Viris, viriis, virexies, virusenixien!
Okay, now there's no need for anymore of that.
This statement is false.
I would have sworn i read that the first "virus" was a gentleman that set his computer to keep re-submitting a print/andor/processing job- and over the weekend it had replicated his request 20k times... bogging down the entire mini system...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I thought there were more....including failed ones and the "text-based" ones where ppl are the replication mechanism....oh, the ol' "GOOD TIMES".
That's funny, the vacuum tubes in our SGI and Sun systems here keep blowing out, I'm getting to think it's a virus at work. I'm sure our IT staff hopes it doesn't keep up for another 20 years.
Welcome our new virus overlords!
... good.T S=0)M NWNNT) p =Y%DF=Y%W=FAF0%ACK=S++%Flags=AS%Ops=MNWNNT) = Y%DF=N%W=0%ACK=S++%Flags=AR%Ops=)% W=0%ACK=O%Flags=R%Ops=)+ +%Flags=AR%Ops=)I PTL=148%RID=E%RIPC K=F%UCK=F%ULEN=134%DAT=E)
nmap -sT -v -v -I -O 24.247.212.249
Starting nmap 3.48 ( http://www.insecure.org/nmap/ ) at 2003-11-10 15:17 EST
Host 24.247.212.249.bay.mi.chartermi.net (24.247.212.249) appears to be up
Initiating Connect() Scan against 24.247.212.249.bay.mi.chartermi.net (24.247.212.249) at 15:17
Adding open port 5000/tcp (owner: [LL]36851)
Adding open port 1025/tcp
The Connect() Scan took 14 seconds to scan 1657 ports.
For OSScan assuming that port 1025 is open and port 1 is closed and neither are
firewalled
Interesting ports on 24.247.212.249.bay.mi.chartermi.net (24.247.212.249):
(The 1638 ports scanned but not shown below are in state: closed)
PORT STATE SERVICE OWNER
21/tcp filtered ftp
25/tcp filtered smtp
80/tcp filtered http
110/tcp filtered pop-3
119/tcp filtered nntp
135/tcp filtered msrpc
136/tcp filtered profile
137/tcp filtered netbios-ns
138/tcp filtered netbios-dgm
139/tcp filtered netbios-ssn
445/tcp filtered microsoft-ds
593/tcp filtered http-rpc-epmap
1025/tcp open NFS-or-IIS
1080/tcp filtered socks
1434/tcp filtered ms-sql-m
5000/tcp open UPnP [LL]36851
6667/tcp filtered irc
12345/tcp filtered NetBus
12346/tcp filtered NetBus
Device type: general purpose
Running: Microsoft Windows 95/98/ME|NT/2K/XP
OS details: Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition (Me), Windows 2000 Professional or Advanced Server, or Windows XP
OS Fingerprint:
TSeq(Class=RI%gcd=1%SI=1D2C%IPID=I%
T1(Resp=Y%DF=Y%W=FAF0%ACK=S++%Flags=AS%Ops=
T2(Resp=Y%DF=N%W=0%ACK=S%Flags=AR%Ops=)
T3(Res
T4(Resp=Y%DF=N%W=0%ACK=O%Flags=R%Ops=)
T5(Resp
T6(Resp=Y%DF=N
T7(Resp=Y%DF=N%W=0%ACK=S
PU(Resp=Y%DF=N%TOS=0%IPLEN=38%R
TCP Sequence Prediction: Class=random positive increments
Difficulty=7468 (Worthy challenge)
TCP ISN Seq. Numbers: A30AF98A A30C5B20 A30DB6FF A30F4B7B A310E563 A3123C5D
IPID Sequence Generation: Incremental
Nmap run completed -- 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 16.341 seconds
md5sum
d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
> > One more year and... (Score:1)
> > They can legally drink?
> Twenty one is the legal drinking age last time I checked. But...
Wow, Twenty plus one equals 21! You're both right!
Does this strike anyone else how ironic that the first program to be infected with a virus was called 'VD' ?
....move along....nothing to see here....
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/09/163125 0&mode=thread&tid=126&tid=128
They must be only counting distinct instances, because I am certain there are more than 60,000 total viruses (including variations). Doesn't mcAfee's (sp?) virus protector claim to protect against something like 300,000 different viruses?
Are they not counting trojans, worms, and the other ancillary definitions of malicious programs?
stuff |
I work in a design office where most people use Mac OS 10.2. I swear to God, now matter how many times I show people virus stats, or point them to articles about Macs and viruses, the SECOND there is something wonky going on, they call scream that they have a virus.
> there are almost 60,000 viruses in existence
So at this rate, how long until the virus definition files for your AV software are so big and so frequent that you need broadband just to stay updated enough to maintain a reasonable level of protection?
How long until it takes gigs of storage space to store them all?
Wonder if Symantec, McAfee, etc., will offer a remote storage service in the future? Does everybody really need to store the same list of virus definitions on C: ?
Are virus definitions the future of AV or will heuristics and other "AI" get good enough in the foreseeable future that the one-off approach of definitions will become obsolete?
Operator, give me the number for 911!
Now that we have established that a sufficiently clever virus can spread rapidly enough to beat the Symantecs of the world, we should be worrying about what this technology can be used for.
Think about some of the things that hard core political organizations could do to their opponents? Think about corporate whistlebowers who could make sure that their secrets hit hundreds of thousands of computer screens in hours or days. Think about someone who sends something as virulent as last month's "Microsoft Support" virus, but with a nasty payload that wipes the user's hard drive.
Or perhaps, think about using viruses as a tool to rapidly spread secret or patent protected information for widespread use without royalties.
All in all, I think that at twenty years we're just seeing the tip of the iceberg. One of these days someone with imagination is going to do something large, fast spreading, and so far unimagined.
Three Squirrels
Brought me back to the commemoration on the 200th Anniversary of Naval-Induced venereal disease.
Joe Script Kiddie can't write code for an X-Box. Yet.
There's also not much to gain since Joe Home User won't be putting anything on the X-Box that JSK would want.
The virus would also have to wedge itself permanently into the system. Otherwise a simple press of the reset button and *poof* cured.
What do you do when your gaming system acts up?
Reset. Console don't get viruses because it's (virtually) impossible by design to make any permanent effects. All Nintendo systems are immune because the system doesn't depend on writable media. Worst that could happen is that your memory card gets fried. But that doesn't affect any of your games or the system itself.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
18 is legal drinking age somewhere.
In many ways John Walker's "Animal" program probably qualifies as the first virus, and it dates back to the mid seventies.
Sorry, but Fred Cohen was not the first virus writer.
These viruses can already drink, and they can probably vote on a Diebold machine. They may already have...
John
I think the whole thing was a sideways jab at hackers:
While virus writers are usually socially adept, many hackers are not.
That's the only line that really stuck out to me in this story... If you read on, however, it looks like they're talking about crackers of sorts. Any idea on who they're trying to insult here?
There's a 68.71% chance you're right.
Yea, or even better yet -- switch to a one button mouse!
The first attacks I recall long predated Microsoft. They were ordinary, text e-mails on UNIX systems containing ASCII escape sequences that programmed "dumb" terminals in order to set their so-called "reply" buffers (which many of the more advanced ones had), and then to request the reply. The stored reply buffer then contained commands that were executed as if the victim typed them. They were called "letter bombs".
Ah, Cascade, which caused the letters on the DOS text screen to tumble down to the bottom. Not the first virus, and not the most damaging virus, but certainly one of the more amusing ones ;-)
The Edmund Fitzgerald sank in Lake Superior on November 10, 1975. Microsoft was also founded in 1975, I believe. There must be a connection.
November the 10th is never a good day.
Don't know about viruses, but the first computer worms (as in programs that dynamically spread themselves across networks) were created at Xerox PARC in 1978. See here (scroll down to "1978") or here for details.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
now to download some viruses and celebrate Woohoo!!!
This BBC article was actually pretty useless. The PC platform was not the dominant platform for the early period of viruses. No mention whatsoever of the Amiga, Atari ST and any other platforms - in Europe at least the first large-scale spread of viruses was on the Amiga and ST, due to the huge amounts of floppy disks being exchanged. At the time, the PC barely had a look in to home computing.
Not a very well researched article, IMHO.
A person found guilty of writing a virus gets a death sentence. I'm still undecided on whether it's stoning or shoving a live snake up their ass but that's a trivial detail.
I so seriously hate those guys. If a button that caused all their heads to explode appeared before me no power in the universe could prevent me from pressing it. Repeatedly.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
I can clear this up. See, it was supposed to say "there are almost 60,000 copies of viruses in existence on people's machines ".
I think they also got the number wrong, it's missing several 0's. It should be something like "six hundred mega-zillion", or some other gigantic number that I would write out if I knew how many 0's to add.
evil evil hackers. Someone should track them all down. Maybe some company could hire bounty hunters.
Superman theme comes on Wait look up in the router
It's a packet
It's a flame
Superman theme dies out
Oh damnit it's just another Microsoft flaw
my bad
MoFscker
Unfortunately I cannot find a web resource for it, but the original article appeared in Computers and Security. The article includes source code in a cross between pseudo-code and a shell command language.
The original article is:
Computer Viruses Theory and Experiments
Fred Cohen
Computers and Security no. 6 (1987)
Pages 22-35
Elsevier Science Publishers, BV (North-Holland)
This article was followed by a plethora of misguided "containment" articles also in Computers & Security. Cohen proved them wrong again in:
Computational Aspects of Computer Viruses
Fred Cohen
Computers & Security no. 8 (1989)
Pages 325-344
Elsevier Science Publishers, Ltd.
As an aside, I read that Mr. Cohen had to wait several years before being able to publish his papers because not a single publication in the US would print his articles. The first article is very entertaining and instructional.
Cohen's first computer virus pseudo-code:(If I have time to scan them, I'll post a link to page scans of these articles; right now I have too much work.)
Cheers,
Eugenehttp://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
I work in a design office where most people use Mac OS 10.2. I swear to God, now matter how many times I show people virus stats, or point them to articles about Macs and viruses, the SECOND there is something wonky going on, they call scream that they have a virus.
Just tell that it is BSD dying!
http://jesus.everdense.com/
Since the first viruses were made on Unix systems (*is* VAX a Unix system? anyway, SCO won't care), they are clearly derivative works of SCO. And all viruses made after that point have been using the methods and IP of these original viruses, and so they are also derivate works of SCO.
SCO is right now considering pontential legal action against these individuals, but have in the mean time offered a licence to use their IP, for the low low price of $599 per CPU affected by such IP. This has been nicknames "Licence to infect*" (*no legal indamnification provided).
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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This sig under construction. Please check back later.
If there weren't viruses to exploit holes, then holes would not get fixed.
If there wern't viruses to exploit holes we'd be living in a VD free world! Some would argue against the patching of holes though.
Love, AC
How ironic that the next story linked at the top of the page is "Microsoft Moving Into Chip Design With Xbox Next" Its one thing when they create shoddy software, but hardware! why they could kill us all!
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
So before anyone says that virus only show up for windows because it is the most popular, also realize that Micro$oft can't even write a secure word processor.
Tell me, if Linux users regularly sent perl/python/[scripting language of choice] code integrated with OpenOffice to eachother, and expected it to be run without having a clue of what it does, how many similar viruses would there be?
The problem is what it is trying to be, which is far more than a word processor. The macros/VB scripts try to be something like a sandbox, where the scripts can do their custom thing without taking the house down.
Unforturnately, locking it down in this way is both difficult and often limiting its usefulness. Sometimes the only difference is intent - if you wanted to do this, it's a feature - if you didn't want to, it's a virus/trojan/logical bomb.
I'm not saying that the feature is well implemented - it is not. But it's trying to be a far more customizable tool than just a word processor.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Just tell that it is BSD dying!
Christ, throwing out a technical term to these people is like dangling a fake steak in front of a dog. He wants it, thinks he needs it, but when he gets it, he discovers he has no idea what it is at all.
These are people I've had to explain the concept of the megabyte to.
Since many viruses are written outside the US, it's quite likely that they "can legally drink" already.
Here and here
Disclaimier: I have no intention of writing this virus in the future. I have not written this virus. I am not in the process of writing this virus. I know of no individuals or groups who have/are/will design this virus.
:)
:)
.doc and .xls files via scripting (simplest method is to write a script to write the exe of the virus, then execute it.) It should also e-mail copies of itself to all contacts in the address book with a social engineering style letter -- with good grammar! It should also have several network methods of attack. It'd be nice to combine msblast, code red, and a couple as-yet-undisclosed vulnerabilities. It should try to upload itself to ftp servers. Both on access to one, and upon sniffing a ftp connection in network traffic. (Bonus points if it can inject a boot sector copy of itself into all the .iso's and bin/cue's out there. Read-only viruses are fun :)
Now that that is out of the way, on to the fun bits
Many people have come up with cool things for viruses to do, or ways to infect machines, or similar. IMHO, this is the design for the worlds second best virus... feel free to do with it as you wish... but don't patent it.. I'm claiming prior art
First off, the virus should have multiple infection vectors. It should scan the local network and infect writeable executeable files. It should also be able to infect
Now, the virus should take steps to hide itself from the user. Of course this means masking the process. It should also mean hijacking the kernel and installing a few drivers so any infected file reads as uninfected to any nosy system process thinking its a virus scanner. But this is not the end.. It should be active in masking itself. First off, any dns requests to a windows update site, or any of the top-10 virus scanners update sites should be redirected to 127.0.0.1 (or to the spoofing machines IP which then responds with a look-alike site saying everything is updated.) Also, attempts should be made to spoof a dns response to any other machine on the lan that requests a dns for those sites. It may or may not work depending on the OS, but you can try, right?
The virus should organize itself into a P2P network. Just for kicks there should be a few hundred of the most "popular" mp3's on this network and the virus should download one a day into the "my music" folder on the hdd. This isn't so much a payload as it is a big finger to the RIAA. "I didn't download that music your honor, Microsoft's crappy software downloaded it for me without my knowledge." Ahh.. the joys of technology. Anyway, the p2p network isn't just for PO the ??AA. It surves a vital purpose...
Updating the virus. Every now and then MS fixes a security vulnerability. A p2p network for distributing viral updates would be a great run-around this. Of course the updates would have to be cryptographically signed and dated. We don't want any old goody-twoshoes uplodaing a fix to the p2p network. For security, any node with a update that doesn't match the signature will be removed from the network.
Depending on who the Architect of such a virus is, the virus can do any number of things... sniff out CC#'s, vote in slashdot polls, send spam, DDOS the entire west coast, order a copy of Wil Wheaton's Dancing Bearfoot from amazon.com, or just play cat-and-mouse with microsoft and anti-virus teams.
Now, as I said this could be the second best virus ever. What will be the best you ask? You'll have to wait until the machines take over for that answer.
They are both holes waiting to be exploited ...
I read that some of u would happily give virus writers the death sentence, how blind can you be??
I would like to give them a medal,it keeps the software programmers (like M$)enough motivation to close leaks caused by moronic-programming which are a security hazard (like dcom, without msblast virus 40% of the windows webservers and 60 % of the webusers using windows would still be open for skriptkiddies to hack (read start an exe and ip and you will be given shell on remote computer),
so I am not talking about the virii opened by some dumb nitwit by clicking an exe called teenporn.jpg.exe, in that case the licence to reprocreate should be revoked from the guy opening that exe..
So lean back, and let nature take his course, you haven't seen nothing yet, the next generation virii are bad, realy bad, I have seen a skeleton (al functions present exept exploit code, and without replication/spreading code) of a virus which was capale of erasing (corrupting) the bios of a lot of hardware (DVD, mainboard, HDD, videocard etc.. from a lot of manufactors (using universal flash method).
If the msblast exploit code was used for this type of virus it would have been a disaster lots and lots of computers would have been trashed..
It's what you al wanted, whithout having REAL computerknowledge you want to click one button sending all your freinds a mail, pay your morgage, wank at sex-pages and play a game..
Sadly 95% of you don't know what you are doing or how the computer realy works.
EqX
Senior Programmer for a Not To Be Mentioned Security Company.
(sorry for my poor English)
And i thought DOS 1.0 was released in August 1981.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
Dang. Though, if you want to get really persnickety, ANIMAL was technically a Trojan horse, as it required human help to spread.
Good catch on going to the original source - if John Walker believes he was the first, I'm 99.9% inclined to believe him.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
PHP & Linux - Hype all you want, but they just suck under load. Guess we'll all read this one later...
BITNET was IBM's RSCS network, pre-TCP/IP. Back in the day, this was the Internet, no joke. BITNET got completely whacked by a virus back around 79 or 80(?).
... then mailed itself to everyone in your address book. (Sound familiar?)
Around Xmas, someone wrote a script that displayed a pretty Xmas tree
Dropped all of BITNET like a stone for days.
> 18 is legal drinking age somewhere.
Most of the world?
It's 18 in the UK, 20 in Japan, and in France I believe the only requirement is that you've been weaned. The USA is one of the most restrictive countries outside the Muslim world.
But there is definitely a predecessor to "VD": The Elk Cloner Virus. Showed up on the Apple II, and the message would appear after 50 resets of the disk. It would infect any disk put in where you did a CATALOG of that disk.
There is a webpage dedicated to it (with source!) at this location.
"Elk Cloner: The program with a personality"
It will get on all your disks
It will infiltrate your chips
Yes it's Cloner!
It will stick to you like glue
It will modify ram too
Send in the Cloner!
There are other similarly dated variants. Elk Cloner has been mentioned in the press in the past; this is someone at the BBC being lazy. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, glorifying the process as if it was a great accomplishment is a little strange.
Dear BBC,
Next time you do an article about virus writing, would you care to mention how Microsoft lowered the bar for virus writers by creating a simplistic macro system with no security and way too much power, (for a word processor, no less!) and has since done nothing to fix this systemic flaw in their products?
How about a little credit where credit is due here, or a little investigative reporting? You could run 'controversial' stories with headlines like "Do users have a right to expect secure software?" or something. At least you didn't start parroting word-for-word MS' old propaganda on the subject, but I'm still not impressed.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
nothing to do with goatse. this is a reference to the tenacious d song wonderboy.
kids here just aren't responsible
>The emergence of Brain kicked off lots of other viruses such as Lehigh, Jerusalem, Cascade and Miami.
I was a student consultant at the Lehigh University computer center (Bethlehem PA, USA) in 1986 when the "Lehigh" virus surfaced. We called it PC-AIDS and told people to wear their "floppy condoms" (write protect tape). A few consultants (Loren Keim et al) wrote the antivirus program for it.
As far as I know, this was the first virus to get national attention. A letter from our center's director was printed verbatim in a PC Magazine column, and that got picked up by other media.
It was interesting to see how people first reacted to the idea of a computer virus. Our references to AIDS and condoms certainly didn't help. It freaked people out (remember, this was 1986).
i'm sure all microsoft copyrights say 1987 don't they? so wouldn't that be 26 years?
I didn't know who wrote the first one, but I'd written one in I believe the fall of 1984 (could have been that winter). Not that I thought I was first, but it was at least pretty early. Nobody had heard the words "computer virus" before, and I certainly didn't use them. I called it a "self-replicating program." In my version I hooked the command interpreter for Apple DOS's "catalog" command and made it copy itself in place on whatever disk it was looking at. Simple and effective -- and benign, since all it did was replicate (although a few variants did more amusing things like change the catalog output subtly).
I knew that was pretty early, but it turned out that there were at least two earlier viruses on the Apple -- both done at colleges circa 1982. The only one I remember was done at I think Texas A&M, and IIRC theirs were substantially more sophisticated than mine.
Oh look, Google even knows about the Texas virus:
http://yarchive.net/risks/early_virus.html
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
Is anybody else bothered by this statement? "Almost every year"? I can certainly find hundreds of examples for each year.
I design user interfaces for a free network management application,
What about the PET virus I wrote in 1981?
---
"Your computer has been infected by a virus.
Please place a blank cassette in tape #1 and press play and record.
When finished, please mail this tape to everyone in your address book who has a PET computer."
---
Mind you it never spread very far..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
Cohen was not the first. I know of at least 2 if not 3 virii for the Apple II prior to Cohen's work. Here's links to stories about some:
n d
http://www.cknow.com/vtutor/vtsladeapple.htm
a
http://www.skrenta.com/
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
10 print chr$(12)
20 print "Your computer has been infected by a virus!"
30 print "Please place a blank cassette in tape deck # 1 and press play and record."
40 print "When finished, please mail this tape to everyone";
50 print " in your address book who has a PET computer."
60 save "I LUV U",1
----
I'll now wait for the police to call..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
We used to also blast control sequences straight to the terminal (since the default in BSD 4.2 and 4.3 was to allow anyone to write to any terminal). The one that we used a lot was the "hard reset" sequence of the vt220, which dropped the RS232 line and triggered a logout, but people rapidly reconfigured the terminals to ignore that. My favorite was to send a lot of nulls since that was more or less invisible but effectively locked up their terminal.
Of course people dealt with this by adding commands to their .login to disable public writeability of their terminal, so the way I dealt with that was to try to grab a descriptor to their tty between the start of login and when the .login script executed (these were the days of the vax, that was a reasonably large window) and just hang onto it in case I wanted to bomb them later.
Oh, the days of having that much free time.
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
12 tricks, stoned, ambulance-a and others were what I would consider a virus. When these email "viruses" figure out how to be polymorphic replicators, *then* the internet as we know it will be ph#cked. How long will it take to scan every file on a 128 Gig harddrive for a polymorphic replicated Slammer derivative? Now how many people will actually sit through it without cancelling it so they can just get their email? It would never get cleaned up.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
Wasn't that one of the coolest days ever? It was like Sci-Fi come to life!
Of course, it became an annoyance, but I still think the idea is pretty darned interesting. If somebody was writing about our world as a piece of speculative fiction, (and this is indeed what our world seems like most of the time to me, especially today), then the computer virus was probably one of the more inventive and award-winning ideas which pushed the book onto the best-seller list.
At least I hope so. Our present world seems kind of like a Neal Stephenson novel which isn't on crack. Maybe it isn't a best-seller.
In any case, I wonder who the main character is? Sure isn't me. I feel like a back-ground noise supporting cast member if anything. Might have brushed shoulders with him/her for a minute somewhere.
Either that, or I am the main character, and it's a really boring novel!
-FL
November the 10th is never a good day.
Be careful, today is the 228th anniversary of the United States Marine Corps, you're likely to incur the wrath of the jarheads with that kind of comment...
All of our operating systems will act like a virus too by sending information about itself back to its creator so the creator can control the offspring...sort of like Windows...
Posthuman since 2001.
"This is a friendly virus. It has done no damage to your computer. Perhaps this will serve as a warning not to copy commercial software in the future!" Ah, the good old days, running copies of Lemmings from dubious sources...
And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
viruses are actually pretty awseome considering what some of them do, the ingeniousness behind them is prolly why they called them "marvelous"
it also keeps competent software makers on their toes to make a more secure and virus free system, most virii dwell on security holes and architecture plagues. (eg, everything windows has to offer)
there's one virus that wins them all, it's that one that has polymorphic code, meaning it can execute on any system on a specific architecture..
a virus like that could be handy because it could help bridge the gap between most operating systems in compatibility..
sometimes with the bad you get the good..
example, when the soviets launched sputnik, this was a "bad" thing for americans, 2 reasons, nuclear weapons being launched from space, and ego.
so, in light of that, (D)ARPA was formed, then came the arpanet, which led to the internet.
so good does come out of seemingly bad events.
virus writing can be considered an art in some cases, considering... especially if someone found out how to make one that could attack any linux system no matter what. now that would be scary, but would show skill.
This slashdot posting is now stoned!
To let off.... -" were commmemorating 20 years of virus' by releasing the biggest best most beastly one yet" :-)
Slashdot - The one stop shop for procrastination
Mr Cohen added his virus to a graphics program called VD that was written for a make of mini-computer called a Vax.
/. so a lot of you dorks living in your parents' basement won't understand the acronym. Venereal Disease, as in a disease transmitted through sexual intercourse. Most of /. has no experience in such matters, so no need to be alarmed.
MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! The first computer virus was added to a program call VD!!! How appropriate...oops I'm on
Legalize M$ bashing!
Is Windows that old??? my my my, how the years are flying by...
The end-user. {attention, credit card, identity}
Everything else is superfluous.
Isn't it obvious? (blogs with trackbacks, webcams, spam, 419s, personalized mailing lists, portal pages, etc.)
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Oh, and what about viruses?
Most viruses now if they aren't trying to help spammers, are creating zombies to launch DDoSs (creating artificial scarecity of a website, possibly to promote a competitor) or to crack IRC channels (again, competing for other's attention)
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
about how the XBox was a test platform for Microsoft's Paladium DRM tech? (oh, I meant "TCPA", sorry).
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
The vulnerable part of Office is not Word. Word is (well historically, I don't know about 2003) a GIGANTIC set of controls/objects that are linked together by Office itself.
Rather, it's the fact that Office at it's core is based heavily on VBscript and other realtime automation tech. It is this component that is exploitable (and quite easily). Because Office exposes so many controls to the scripting environment, it is very easy to write Macros that can use these features to propogate themselves into all your Office work.
You can do really cool stuff with Macros, and you can also do really nasty stuff (how are you to encode checking for "purpose"?)
This is why managed/signed code is a good feature. Office2003 should be less susceptible to this sort of thing: set to only run macros signed by people you trust.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
make it >>> than the disk cache size, and you're flying.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
how long until the virus definition files for your AV software are so big and so frequent that you need broadband just to stay updated enough to maintain a reasonable level of protection?
AFAIK, most modern AV product are using incremetal virus pattern (or definition, in Symantec's language) file update, which means you only need to download 100K or so per-week. That's really doable even for dial-up users.
Are virus definitions the future of AV or will heuristics and other "AI" get good enough in the foreseeable future
The company I'm working for are doing such researchs for a long time, of course you can detect all virus by some abnormal behaviors, such as network activity, registry operation, address book enumeration, etc. The difficult part is, you can not make sure that all your detections are really virus. False report may worse than negligence, sometimes. There's still a long way to go.
As with many other things in 1970s computing, UNIVAC was way ahead.
Before Micro$oft, IBM was in charge of flawed software. ..." sort of message.
In the 1960-70s they developed a time-sharing system for mainframes called CMS.
You logged in to your virtual machine and had a virtual mini-disk of your own files,
and mounted and read other mini-disks containing the
"SYSTEM" and applications and data.
After reading the directory of such a virtual drive into your VM, CMS would
run a specially-named "On Access" shell script that could be set there
by the disk's owner. These could
ask for a password or just run some accounting, etc.
But you were not in control of what they did.
Most casual users never used the feature and
were even unaware of how to set it up.
So hackers would write little scripts that jumped
onto your mini-drive, to spread to those who
later accessed your files.
It was a kinder, gentler time, of course, so although they could erase or patch files, I never
saw any worse than a cryptic "we are control your
I first saw this in early 1978, but the system was
a few years on by then.
There are a million pages out there on virus history. I little research goes a long way... The name "virus" is 20 years old, but the concept is two to three times as old as that.
Here's a google cache link to an article referring to Core Wars
T
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
I can't believe I'm this old, but I seem to remember writing what were called "animals" in honeywell assembler code back in 1983 during a systems programming class at Dartmouth. I don't suppose these were technically viruses, but they did self-propagate. Does anybody remember these things being called "animals" back then?
Um, no. Wired has a surprisingly detailed article about slammer. If you're too lazy to read it, the poster you were disparaging was in fact completely correct.
Perhaps you're thinking of LoveSan, aka msblast?
As for the "assembly is the only real language, everyone else is a poeser wannabe" comment, I do have to say that the first MSWord
With all due respect, I first heard a programmer talking about a program called VIRUS in the summer of 1968, as well as another program called VACCINE. I immediately incorporated the idea into the novel I was writing at the time, WHEN HARLIE WAS ONE. (Published in 1972.) Now, it's possible that the VIRUS story was apocryphal in 1968, but this programmer seemed to think it had actually happened; at least, that's the way he told it. John Brunner created the term "worm" in his 1974 novel, THE SHOCKWAVE RIDER, and he did much more with the idea than anyone else had ever done, accurately predicting the way worms would prowl a network. But even before widespread online connectivity, in the days when shareware was distributed on 5" floppies, we were all being warned about the danger of viruses in shareware distributions. Compuserve forums had software for download, and those files were all routinely scanned for viruses. Of course, in those days, viruses and Trojans were a lot simpler and a lot easier to block. (Except for the fact that we had to hike five minles barefoot through the snow, uphill both ways, every morning, just to get to the computer.) So I wonder why folks are marking 1983 as the beginning of the viral era? If we're talking only about PC's, it's possible that the first viruses were distributed in 78 or 79. If we're talking about DEC-10s and PDP-11s, it's possible that the first viruses were ten years older.
louisiana was the last state in the union with 18. But the feds made it so you loose federal matching funds for highways if you don't make it 21. And no one is dumb enough to loose that much money for people who don't bother to vote anyway. Hence federal law is basically 21.
This number which seems dumb (and is) is due to the fact that the liver is still developing until your 21. So good thought bad idea. The reality of the remnants of the puritan culture in the US really means that people will do anything to drink from about 13 on. (Becasue its bad and bla bla bla.) If all you drank was one glass of red from 13 on you'd probably be a hell of a lot less of a Barney the the jackasses who drink 15 drinks a night from highschool on.