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).

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.

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.