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.

Comments

Aren't they at least 21?

[xanthines-R-yummy]

wasn't the first boot sector virus written around 1982 on what was then called the Nova system? i believe it infected the track 0 of the diablo disk drives.

Anyone old enough to know what I'm talking about?

Re:Aren't they at least 21?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was the person who first isolated the Westwood
virus. It seems like that was more than 20 years
ago... but it wasn't. It was 1990.

I remember there was a lot of hoopla about how
there was a "Friday The 13th" virus that was
going to attack the computers of the UC system
in August of 1990.

I bought a motherboard and a 10Mb HD from a
Taiwanese sutdent at UCLA who was going into the
PC hardware business.
The HD came with DOS and a copy of speed.com
installed... I noticed the first time I ran it
that speed.com reported an odd, inexplicable
value for the processor MHz.
After m$ word failed with a checksum error (m$
products failed more gracefully in those days)
I compared word.exe to the copy stored elsewhere
on the HD and found some odd strings. I managed
to get an almost clean copy of the viral code by
writing a short assembly program and running it.

I reported this to the SEASNET folks, and in a
couple of hours they called me back and said
"congratulations, you have isolated the Friday
the 13th virus".

I asked them to keep my name and department out
of the press release, hence it became known as
the Westwood virus in honor of the location of
UCLA (go figure).

Anyone remember this one...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Something wonderful has happened...Your Amiga is alive!"

Good ol' days.... ;)

XBox viruses?

[3Suns]

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?

Re:thank you, thank you..

[grub]

People write for MS because it's what people use.

Microsoft apologism.
There were viruses on the Mac "back in the day", UNIX worms and Linux worms but MS doesn't have enough fingers to stick in the dike. Consumer product recalls don't come about because many people use them, they come about because of flaws in the product. Software companies are immume to these types of recalls and we all pay.

Once and for all

[bigjnsa500]

Once and for all I'd like to see a breakdown of what systems these virus' go after. I wanna know how many AIX, how many Windows, SCO, DOS, OS 8-10, etc.. these things are meant for, you know, the whole schabang.

Londo and the Computer Demons

[Alien54]

I am reminded of the Babylon 5 Episode where the Centauri Ambassador Londo Mollarri has offended someone he should not, resulting in his room and accounts being molested by some sort of Computer Demon, which proceeds to place all the music he hates, messing with the enviromental controls (including odors) and even messing with all of his communications and financial accounts. (episode synopsis here)

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?")

Viruses and OS X

[Pyro226]

Because of the regular virus infections that take down half of the network at my Highschool (half of the computers are Macs, the rest are windows), all students that want to bring in laptops have to go the the computer lab and get a copy of Norton Antivirus installed. This rule applies to both Mac and Windows computers, despite the fact that we haven't gotten any Mac viruses. Because of this my friend got a copy of Norton on his nice new Powerbook.

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.

Viruses

[TrippTDF]

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.

Downloading virus definitions?

[Strange Ranger]

> 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?

Subtle jibes and jabs

[Target Practice]

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?

Fred Cohen's original article

[ciurana]

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:

program virus :=
{ 1234567;

subroutine infect-executable :=
{ loop: file = random-executable;
if first-line-of-file = 1234567
then goto loop;
prepend virus to file;
}

subroutine do-damage :=
{ whatever damage is desired }

subrutine trigger-pulled :=
{ return true on desired conditions }

main-program :=
{ infect-executable;
if trigger-pulled then do-damage;
goto next;
}
next: } // rest of the infrected program

(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,

Eugene

Re:"Celebrate"?

[Chatterton]

Good old virus were marvelous. The one who can put themself into an MBR sector, COM or EXE executable. Who can disimulte themself and trick antivirus with interruption tunnelling. Written in assembler. With polymorphism, Encryption... Yes those virus were marvelous. Not the shit you can have now written by some looser in vbscript :/

The "Lehigh" virus (aka PC-AIDS)

[teefal]

>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).

Re:"Celebrate"?

[Anonymous Coward]

What? I have checked out the source code of most of the old school 1980's virus's and they were most certainly NOT the product of expert coding and I can remember very few that were just plain old damned impressive as you put it. I just think that many people like to say: "Everything now a days sucks, its not like it was back in the good old days when people really knew how to write a virus" Dark Avenger and all of the famous old-school virus writers were just pimply faced kids who could'nt code well at all. Seriously. Most of those virus's sucked.

As far as your comment about todays viruses being junk. Well, hell, look at Saphire (SQL-Slammer worm). The entire fscking worm fit inside of a single UDP packet! . There are lots of cool virus's being written nowadays. You just have to look.

Re:thank you, thank you..

[RLW]

Exactly! If Apache were as vulnerable as MS IIS then the web would be un-usable. At 70% web server share Apache should be the server to attack not MS IIS. It would be interesting to compare attack attempts vs. success by platform. I don't have the data but I will bet my house that Apache will fair much better than IIS.