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

"Celebrate"?

[ummit]

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".

Re:"Celebrate"?

[bananaape]

If there weren't viruses to exploit holes, then holes would not get fixed.

If it doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger... something like that.

Re:"Celebrate"?

[Lumpy]

Most of these viruses, espically the early ones were examples of expert coding. Extremely clever viruses that were unbelieveably tiny and worked well, taking them apart tought you alot about the sheer genius behind them.

today, the viruses are copycats or from virus kits or just plain wannabe's writing junk that happens to work and take advantage of huge holes.

I suggest you actually learn about these buggers, they are absolutely facinating and the early ones are just plain old damned impressive.

It's like the old Demo scene... amazing things with tiny bits of code.

Does this mean that they'll ...

[burgburgburg]

finally leave home and get a job?

Their mother and I have put up with enough!

thank you, thank you..

[grub]

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]

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.

Re:thank you, thank you..

[Carnildo]

Blaming it on Microsoft is foolish. There are exploits in every OS out there. People write for MS because it's what people use.

I've got a great counter-example for that. Microsoft's IIS web server runs about 20% of all web sites, while Apache runs 70%. By your logic, Apache should be the server everyone attacks.

I've been running a copy of the Apache web server on my home computer for the last three months. During that time, I've logged 22,000 attacks on my server. And every last one of those was attacking it as if it were IIS.

i'm celebrating by

[Savatte]

opening up and unsecuring all the ports on my machine!

Scary

[metlin]

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.

Re:Scary

[GoofyBoy]

>Is this an omen of some sorts?

Yes, it means that its almost time for another SCO article.

What wonders shall there be to come

[bigberk]

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!)

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).

Viruses signal the organic nature of the net

[heironymouscoward]

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.

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:XBox viruses?

[Jeedo]

Yes, unlike windows it doesnt have any ports open by default.

Journalists

[Doomrat]

"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.

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.

Wait a year.

[missing000]

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.

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.

Yeah, old stories (fuzzy feelings)

[danigiri]

A little tear streaked down on my cheek! O' the good ole' days!!!

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.

Wrong anniversary, this is their 21st.

[plover]

I remember an article in Scientific American that spoke to a young man named Richard Skrenta, who wrote an Apple ][ virus in 1982. I remember him bemoaning the fact that "it got onto his disks, the math teacher's disks and all his friends disks."

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...

Worms are TWENTY-FIVE years old...

[alispguru]

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.