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20 Years of Computer Viruses
Tuxedo Jack writes "The Register reports that twenty years ago today (19 January 1986), the first computer virus, Brain, was discovered. By modern standards, this was a minor virus, and it spread by floppy disks, which is a far cry from the network-aware worms of today. Still, though, it was the first noted virus, and we've had twenty years of pain and annoyance from it and its successors. Happy birthday, Brain, you and all your little virus friends - just know we're doing our damndest to keep you from having more."
Thanks to the Blaster virus, I'm getting married in 2 days. See, viruses aren't all bad.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
Not the first virus. It's the first PC virus, meaning IBM PC running DOS.
...Did it run on linux..?
Welcome to the Dungeon :430791,443248,280530.
(c) 1986 Basit & Amjad (pvt) Ltd.
BRAIN COMPUTER SERVICES
730 NIZAB BLOCK ALLAMA IQBAL TOWN
LAHORE-PAKISTAN
PHONE
Beware of this VIRUS....
Contact us for vaccination.
I wonder if anyone ever tried to look up these guys. Kind of blatent calling card if you ask me.
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
Requiring the user to execute an email attachment is to spreading invisibly via floppy disk
as
a) Slashdot is to news
b) Bush is to Clinton
c) Moth is to butterfly
d) Suicide is to STD
And, "The first PC virus was a boot sector virus called (c)Brain, created in 1986 by two brothers, Basit and Amjad Farooq Alvi, operating out of Lahore, Pakistan. The brothers reportedly created the virus to deter pirated copies of software they had written."
I LOVE YOU
... how Quantum Viruses would be.
I love humanity, it is people I hate
Time to whip out the old 5 1/4" floppies!!!!!!
"Happy birthday, Brain, you and all your little virus friends - just know we're doing our damndest to keep you from having more."
Good luck. You'll need it, 'cause selection pressure tends to win.
... it spread by floppy disks, which is a far cry from the network-aware worms of today.
While a network virus could reach around the globe in a matter of seconds, floppy disk viruses were just as bad before networks and CDs became common. Not only did you have to scan your own hard drive, but each and every floppy disk if you didn't know where the virus came from. You often had to practice "safe computing" by asking if the floppy disk was scanned before you use it on your own machine.
If you are getting married because of a viral outbreak, then it's simplest to just think of yourself as a virtual-wartime profiteer.
20 years ago: Beware of this VIRUS
20 days ago: lol this is not a virus
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
create a crisis and provide means of solving the crisis for a nice fee.
:430791,443248,280530.
Welcome to the Dungeon
(c) 1986 Basit & Amjad (pvt) Ltd.
BRAIN COMPUTER SERVICES
730 NIZAB BLOCK ALLAMA IQBAL TOWN
LAHORE-PAKISTAN
PHONE
Beware of this VIRUS....
Contact us for vaccination............ $#@%$@!!
can we be sure the same thing isn't happening today at say... symantec?
You can't handle the truth.
Windows is also 20 years old, give or take a couple of months.
:)
Laugh, it's a joke. Windows wasn't even natively network aware until 10 years later
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
I've had and maintained Windows boxes fairly constantly for the last 15 years, and to date the only Windows virus I've had problems with was CIH (aka Chernobyl). That was pretty bad though, a completely busted hard drive.
The only other virus to penetrate my defences was stoned.angelina, back in the DOS days. Don't think I even had a virus scanner back then.
"No, I'm Brian, and so's my wife!"
Get your own free personal location tracker
When one media pundit was being subjected to derision because of his outlandish idea that viruses might be spread by email.
Coincidently, it was twenty years ago today that my first sexually transmiteed virus, Herpes, was discovered. Compared to today's potential bird flu, its a minor virus, and like Brain, it spread by my "floppy disk" (as I like to call it). Still, though, it was my first noted virus, and I've had twenty years of pain and annoyance from it and its many successors. Happy birthday, Herpes, you and all your little virus friends - just know I'm doing my damndest to keep myself from having more.
It uses to be that "worm" != "virus". Now days, it seems, many people call just about everything a "virus", when in fact, the "more proper definition" would be worm. Or, maybe I'm just being an old fart about this. It's pretty simple. If it is a _standalone_ program meant to infect machines, then it would be considered a "worm". If the malicous program where to "infect" other programs (say - via .exe, .com infector or MBR), it's a "virus".
That is, a "virus" will actually "attach" itself to a existing program (old com/exe infectors for eaxmple) or load themselves into the MBR/boot records. Then again, I see very obvious "trojans" get called "viruses!!!" all the time as well. Oh well :)
Main reason being there's no real need. There's enough assholes out there betweek immature assholes looking to cause trouble and greedy assholes looking to use systems for spam and such that there's just no lack of viruses.
Remember that if they were doing such a thing they'd face extreme criminal charges when caught, and make no mistake, they would be caught. There's a lot of anti-virus companies out there, and a lot of security researchers. Sooner or later, I'd be diacovered they were the source and then they'd be fucked.
You don't take risks like that if there's no reason. Ten viruses per year being released would be plenty to ensure your continued existance, since it only takes one nasty one to remind people your software is valuable. Given the thousands that are released, there's no reason to put yourself at risk making more.
The same thing we do every night, Pinky, try to infect the world!
If you smoke after sex, you're doing it too fast.
I don't think that's true, many old viruses used to operate mainly in the boot sector, and as such were infecting and spreading at a level beneath the OS (and beneath filesystems, for that)
I don't care what kind of disk you're booting, it has an MBR, and there might be a virus in it...
-bugg
The method of replication has little to do with if it's a "virus" or not. By a traditional sense, most "virii" we see now days are actually worms. I just posted about traditional definitions a minute ago. Here's what ole wikipeia has to say: "In computer security technology, a virus is a self-replicating program that spreads by inserting copies of itself into other executable code or documents. A computer virus behaves in a way similar to a biological virus, which spreads by inserting itself into living cells. Extending the analogy, the insertion of a virus into the program is termed as an infection, and the infected file (or executable code that is not part of a file) is called a host. Viruses are one of the several types of malicious software or malware. In a common parlance, the term virus is often extended to refer to worms, trojan horses and other sorts of malware, however, this can confuse computer users, since viruses in the narrow sense of the word are less common than they used to be, compared to other forms of malware." Not the "inserting copies of itself _into other executable code". How it replicates is not what makes it a virus. User interaction or not, has nothing to do with it.
- Dewdney, A. K.; Computer Recreations - In the game called Core
War hostile programs engage in a battle of bits; Scientific American; Mar 1984.
- Dewdney, A. K.; Computer Recreations - A Core War bestiary of
viruses, worms and other threats to computer memories; Scientific
American; Mar 1985.
I've always believed that were it not for these Scientific American articles, it would have taken a lot longer for viruses to become prevalent. These articles piqued the interest of computer users (then synonymous with programmers) everywhere. For example, here's a 1994 comp.sys.apple2 post I just found of someone who was seduced by the articles into writing viruses.This is year 10 of me using Windows virus free.
Plus 4 years of DOS before that.
I've owned machines running DOS 5.0, Windows 3.0, 3.1, OS/2 2.1, OS/2 2.11, Windows 2k Server, Windows XP, Solaris 2.4, Solaris 2.5, Solaris 2.5.1, Solaris 2.6, IRIX 6.2, IRIX 6.5, NeXTSTEP 2.x, NeXTStep 3.3, OpenStep 4.2, OpenBSD 2.{5,6,7,8}, Linux TAMU, Slackware 1.0 (and a bunch of subsequent versions).
Do you know what?
I have never had a virus of any kind on any of those machines.
The best anti-virus protection is inbetween your ears.
Ironically, my IRIX machine was remote rooted, and i had a DOS successfully launched against my Solaris 2.6 machine (sunkill.. made telmod eat cpu/ram in kernel time).
My windows machines have comparatively been trouble free.
What the hell do you people do where your machines are always screwed up with malware on them? Do you not even bother to think about the consequences of your actions?
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
You will soon be the first ./ user to 'do the worm' twice in one year.
Read Pynchon.
I get STONED most evenings.
sudo killall humans
I remember my PC getting stoned from a game being passed around, what an annoyance that was (relatively speaking). From that point on I swore never to let my computers near drugs again.
The unexamined life is not worth living
Macro Viruses, e-mails, Melissa, Blaster... what do they have in common, kids?
"Microsoft products!"
Well done, kids! You get an extra point today!
So the fuck what.
This is year 22 of me using a Microsoft OS...virus free.
The most important component for virus protection is the one sitting between the chair and the keyboard. Everything else (including OS choice) is largely irrelevant.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
I'm upgrading my personal mailserver from RedHat 7.2 (now no longer supported by Progeny, alas) tonight to CentOS 4.2. For about 1/2 hour, my new mail server's antivirus wasn't set up, even though email service was on.
I was SHOCKED at how many viruses came in - like 40, more than 1 per minute! That means that this mail server was getting some 1,500 crap emails for me every day.
Unbelievable...
I've just gotten used to never seeing viruses in my email - it's an incredible crapflood of this stuff out there.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
My first virus came off a "commercial" 5.25" floppy that I paided for. (go figure!) This was back in the late 1980's or early 1990's I believe. Sucked big time. ;)
Dana
Life was hell, then I discovered Linux...
I read the first article about the theoretical possibility of a PC virus in either 1984 or '85, at this time most people scoffed at it, simply refusing to believe it was possible.
.com/.exe etc) and saved this to a text file on a bootable floppy, which was then marked read-only.
:-(
Anyway, having written quite a bit of asm code, I had no problems accepting the possibility, so for fun I decided to write a sort of vaccine:
Simply a small program that took a digitial signature of every executable piece of code (boot blocks,
Afterwards I could simply put in this floppy and reboot, whereupon the same program would compare the current signatures with those saved on the floppy.
The problem was to keep the original list updated each time I wrote a new program.
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
This is the first computer virus. From 1975. With source code.
... when some of the virus were funny, like this one that was playing the "Hitchcock Presents" theme once in a while. Or that other one that was beeping each time the Enter key was pressed. This was a time where a TSR was not some obnoxious prick trying to sell you phony mortgage plans.
Nowadays the virus are mostly mail-related, so you get annoyed by other people's virus all the time. Sad.
lucm, indeed.
And theres me thinking the SCA bootblock virus from the SCA in 87 was a trendsetter, but obviously beaten by the apple II stuff. It certainly was a nice piece of code for 4k, funky scrolling text on a red bar set on a black background with the words "Something wonderful has happened" fading up and the usual bootloader. I remember the first time seeing this and someone explaining to me how it replicated, and thinking it was a wind up. Then realizing it was not. The fact they stuffed this into 4k was at the time something of a eye opener and I think help spark the 4k demo scene on the amiga (that and that is the size of the bootsector on a amiga floppy)
The only real problem with it was commercial games used the 4k bootsector on the floppy to bootstrap their copy protected loaders in, and it used to overwrite these.
We managed to keep the spread down to a minimum by use of a cunning device known as a "write protect tab". That is once we had virus checked a disk, it was write protected and that was that, since joe average could not afford a hard disk back then and the amiga ran out of its roms anything memory resident just went when the power was pulled...
On meeting the guy, did you chuck him in the nearest river? Because that would have been the only meeting that loon would have been a good time for me. The stoned virus very nearly wiped out my A-Level computing project (UK exams taken at 18) and nearly got me banned from the lab as well. Had I not had an ST with some fairly nice sector copying programs, I would have lost everything with a week to go, and so my University chance would have been blown. And yeah backups, but I was still learning and you've got to remember that this virus stuff was still relatively new at the time (1989).
Cretins who write these things aren't being cool, they're just sociopathic idiots and should be treated as such.
Cheers,
Ian
.. is one of the most memorable occurances in virus history. An author wrote a book on viruses - the title of which shall remain nameless - and helpfully included the source code to an actual virus. Which led to dozens of variants appearing virtually overnight. Not the smartest thing to do.
it spread by floppy disks, which is a far cry from the network-aware worms of today.
"The first implementation of a worm was by two researchers at Xerox PARC in 1978. The authors, John Shoch and Jon Hupp, originally designed the worm to find idle processors on the network and assign them tasks, sharing the processing and so improving the whole network efficiency."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_worm
Not only was it a "network aware" worm, but also a rootkit and a crude "grid" implementation.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Really? You and all your friends and family are running something other than MS Windows then I take it? ;-)
Yes, I know viruses are technically able to happen in any environment, but practically speaking, how many non-MS-specific viruses (not worms) are currently in the wild for non-MS platforms?
I wouldn't have love at all.
This virus taught me that no warning will stop humans from investigating urequited love notes from their office coworkers.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
For 40 years IBM made computers that were pretty robust. The o/s memory and files were in a privileged part of the machine and out of the reach of ANY user. Why can't we do this with pc's?
>THE PLURAL OF VIRUS IS _NOT_ VIRI OR VIRII! Its viruses.
THE CONTRACTED FORM OF "IT IS" IS _NOT_ ITS!
It is = it's. You should learn this before correcting others with dictionary definitions.