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The Computer Virus Turns 25 in July
bl8n8r writes "In July of 1982, an infected Apple II propogated the first computer virus onto a 5-1/4" floppy. The virus, which did little more than annoy the user, Elk Cloner, was authored in Pittsburgh by a 15-year-old high school student, Rich Skrenta. The virus replicated by monitoring floppy disk activity and writing itself to the floppy when it was accessed. Skrenta describes the virus as "It was a practical joke combined with a hack. A wonderful hack." Remember, he was a 9th grader when he did this."
...if he had patented the virus.
Is there any information on the average age of people who have written the major viruses of the last couple decades? Has this age gone down over time?
I was at Lehigh when this was released. One of the first self propagating viruses, with a time delay to allow for greater infection, that was actually destructive. It was sort of a non-event to the users there; imagine my surprise when I looked it up years later and it figures prominently in virus history.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
I take a snapshot of my sister's desktop, then open it in photoshop and clone all sorts of icon and littering it all over like a mess, then save the file and use it as a desktop background. She comes over to me screaming that her desktop is a mess and she couldn't find anything, and she can't open an icon when she clicks on it, much less highlight it! AHAHAHAHAHA!!!
:D
Not a virus, just a prank but still
is that the viruses for it are traditionally written by 9th graders who use the B: drive...
Atheist: Buddhist in a Prius
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (I recently upgraded from an 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM to an 8-core 3.0Ghz Mac Pro) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this 8-core Mac Pro, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Safari will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 3.0Ghz 8-core machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=SPZI.PK&t=5d/
Finally, you're old enough to rent a car.
Malware writers don't give a rat's rear about other laws, why do you think they'd honor patents? Especially when they're usually sitting in countries that don't care too much about foreign patents in the first place.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Mac OS has never had a virus problem.
Every 50th booting you'd get this (Note "-" is represents a ). 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!- Now if I had gotten that when I was a little kid on my little Apple 2, I'd cry.
It's a type of Parrot you dolt
Anyone remember that one? It was such a pain in the ass at the time, but it didn't go around and delete files, etc. And we got it from pirating program after program. Solution? Install a pirated version of the first anti-virus programs. I'm so old that I can't remember what exactly it was... It might actually have been Norton.
I'm not claiming mine was the oldest because I'm sure someone did something similar on the old heavy iron even earlier than my little "payload" as we called then it.
Best prank i've done is code a little application that takes a snapshot of your desktop, puts it in as background and hides bottom toolbar... sit back and enjoy!
Probably was McAfee. Which was a fantastic scanner at the time. Oh how things have changed since then. Sad to see both McAfee and Norton/Symantec turn into useless piles of garbage considering what they once were...
That was the first virus I remember, but its just 19 years old. It paralyzed the internet when it was released. But then the Net just had a few thousand nodes, most of them in the university. The worm was supposed to count nodes by sending a copy of itself to every entry in the host table, but the author forget to account for duplicates and circularities. So it just replicated until it filled the process spaces and internet bandwidth.
1981 - Apple Viruses 1, 2, and 3 are some of the first viruses "in the wild," or in the public domain. Found on the Apple II operating system, the viruses spread through Texas A&M via pirated computer games.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I had sex with a PDP-11 in 1973 and it gave me chlamydia. That predates this asshat by almost a decade. Where's my trophy?!
Of the "ten most destructive PC viruses of all time":
CIH, by Chen Ing Hau, who "attended a university" at the time of release ~1998.
Melissa virus, by David L. Smith, age 31 in 1999
ILOVEYOU, by university student for thesis, 2000
Code Red, author unknown?
SQL Slammer, 2003, by a 21-22 year old
Blaster, 2003, variant by an 18 year old
Sobig, possibly by 30 year old Ruslan Ibragimov?
Bagle, author unknown?
MyDoom, unknown
Sasser, by 17 year old
Not much to go on.
My understanding was that the first computer viruses were penned at Bell Labs in a series of experiments called the "Core Wars". The goal was to eliminate as many enemy tasks as possible while keeping your tasks running. Byte has an article on the subject in the 1980's. Of course, at the time, disk media were in limited supply. This made spreading away from the test mainframe next to impossible.
Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War
I alway thought the first virus was the Pakistani Brain, written by two brothers who ran a computer store that sold pirated software in Pakistan.
G_++
A couple thousand years ago, I deliberately infected a wooden abacus with termites, and put it in the mud hut with all the other abaci.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
but I remember a very old Scientific American article (60's maybe?) about program wars in which two programs would simultaneously reside in memory and each would seek out the other to destroy it, usually by inflicting a fatal erasure of a vital part from the memory stack. The article described the programs' different strategies of seek-and-destroy while simultaneously moving itself around to avoid destruction. Pretty primitive, but great fun.
Ibid.
Sadly, you represent a majority of the "CS Degree owners".
It's people like you that get jobs in major corporations and end up becoming security advisors.
My first questions in an interview to hire someone is, "Are you a programmer?" The second question is,"Did you goto school for this?" If they answer "yes" then they don't get the job. But if they explain how they were well into programming before any formal education or possibly don't have any formal education, then they have the job (as long as they can back it up with skills).
I've realized that programming isn't something that can be taught. It's a way of thinking. You either have it, or you don't. The language and tools are a minor piece of the puzzle.
P2P Anonymous Distributed Web Search: http://www.yacy.net/
"The virus, which did little more than annoy the user, Elk Cloner..." I knew Elk, and more than annoyed. Who new we'd all yearn for the day viruses were that benign?
So you're the frakker that fathered the Cylons!
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
Late 90's/Early '00s. Had a friend working the computer lab when full shutdown occurred and EVERY screen crashes and goes blank (I THINK it was due to Melissa)...near finals, so everyone was working on their final projects and papers in the labs. 50+people saying "Oh, S---" at the same time. Most profs were nice and had some sympathy.
I had a friend back in the early 90s who one day found that his Amiga 500 wouldn't load some game. Then he proceeded to warm boot and test ALL his other floppy disks to see if they had the same problem. That virus destroyed 50 disks worth of pirated games in less than an hour.
OK, whether or not the old Mac OS sucked, which is simply a flamebate argument not worth getting into, what does that have to do with an *APPLE* virus?
-Daniel
I thought Apples couldn't get viruses?
:(
My world is now crashing in on me
You know that "life" thing? That was me. I got cast down to my creation after infecting the Matrix.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
By any chance, was his name "Zero cool"? :P
Yes.
Still funny as hell though.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
The Dark Avenger Virus was the first to use a polymorphic encryption engine, in order to change it's "signature" at runtime.
It also pioneered the use of the "delta offset" - a clever assembly language trick that allowed for the body of the virus to be relocatable to any segment in memory, without hardcoding.
Perhaps most importantly, the commented source code for this virus was spread far and wide and inspired the creation of many virus groups such as Falcon/Skism and Nuke.
Sorry, but Creeper beat that Apple II virus by about 10 years.
c hapter=153310937
c hapter=153310910 states that such ideas and programs already started in the 40s and 50s.
http://www.viruslist.com/en/viruses/encyclopedia?
Furthermore http://www.viruslist.com/en/viruses/encyclopedia?
Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai
Seriously, how did this make the headlines ?
All it does is encourage people to flame it.
Pretty much for as long as computers have been useful there have been other people interested in stopping them from being useful. It's not really something to celebrate.
The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from. -- Andrew S. Tanenbaum
The idea of computer viruses are much older then even 1979. Two stories come to mine "The Adolescence of P1" - 1977, "The ShockWave Rider" 1975, both which describe the concept of malicious, unwanted computer programs that infect other systems. While these books describe concepts, they were more then likely based on then current discussions in the computer world.
Wow, the Virus could be Blogging's father. That is if he's not reading slashdot - in this case older brother is the best he can be (not old enough to be even Vlogging's dad).
Xerox PARC had personal computers connected with Ethernet in the laboratory in 1976. Yes, these were not commercially available, but the technology was pretty much the same as seen later when commercial products were introduced (by others). About then (maybe 1977), a researcher installed some software on one PC to do an experiment in load sharing among PCs. The software replicated across the entire lab and generated a storm of traffic that shut everything down. The first PC virus was an denial of service attack.
First computer virus was the Windows Operating System
Not enough time right now to go into depth, but I sorting through a collection of 5.25" Apple images, I saw this message popup on one of the emulators "bootup". Had no idea what it was and didn't bother looking too far in depth into it. This was back in 2006, when I was organizing my collection of stuff I had written as a kid, random public domain disks I had copies, of, random things I had made copies of as a kid from my gradeschool computer lab, etc...in the process, plenty of "catalog" commands ran (this is how it spreads, he has the 6502 source http://www.skrenta.com/cloner/clone-src.txt on his website and a few more items about it there), plenty of disks "swapped" out of virtual floppy drives, so I'm sure the infection is well spread.
:)
Maybe I'll keep it around as a living pet in my emulator
Imagine his wealth...if he had patented the virus.
His patent would have been challenged due to prior art. (One I know about is John Walker's "Pervading Animal" in 1975, although there are claims of earlier stuff.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Well some people admired of MacOS works and millions of hours multimedia, billions of mainstream newspapers, millions of scientific research done with it. The stuff you watch on your HDTV if produced back in 1990s is probably completely produced on that poor old OS which you claim to have sucked.
I would also like to point out that IRIX was a wonderful multimedia OS. Especially if you needed to render something in OpenGL (they made OpenGL after all...)
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
I'd beat that kid up after school.
Then go to my house and stop me from burning that wash rag in the kitchen sink!
Didn't realise the Apple ][ used the 6502, wasn't that the same CPU in the original 8-bit NES?
According to other reporting this is not actually the first virus. The first virus really should be the Creeper virus that infected DARPANET systems back in the early 70's. According to Viruslist, the virus was written for the Tenex operating system and was capable of independently gaining access through a modem and copying itself to a remote system. Once infected, the system would display the following message: "I'M THE CREEPER: CATCH ME IF YOU CAN."
The Reaper was written to replicate and find Creeper and delete it. Then came Rabbit in 1974 which caused systems to crash because it screwed system performance due to replicating so fast (wonder why it was called Rabbit.....)
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
Ah, the joy of being young and destructive. Reminds me of something I did when I was younger...
I was in my middle school computer lab, bored and I guess pissed off about something. Anyway, the lab machines were these Mac SE/30's, old even for the time. On the hard drive there were eight folders. So in a bid to freak out the next person to use the computer, I placed all of these into one folder. Then I made eight new folders, and renamed them with the names of the eight original folders. Then I placed these into a folder, and copied that folder eight times. I renamed the copies with the names of the eight originals. Then I placed these into a folder, and repeated the process. So now when someone opened one of the folders, they would find the same folders. When they oppened one of those, they would find the same folders again. The actual files I put in some random bottom level folder. (if I had been really trying to be an ass, I would have made them invisible)
Amazingly enough, the instructor did not see the humor in what I had done. For my part I was shocked that she hadn't thought of a better way to find the originals, other than manually searching through all the folders.
The Register might want to start checking its facts.
put it in the bit bucket
http://www.kottke.org/98/11/my-mac-sucks
Doesn't this sound an awful lot like the OP to you? It gets posted (usually in a modified form) as a rather amusing troll in most Mac-related discussions here nowadays. The "SWITCHEUR" troll is pretty funny too.
I may make you feel, but I can't make you think.
...and Tron had it's 25th anniversary just a few weeks before....Coincidence?
*insert ominous music*
CyberKender
Apparently Appointed Lord Mayor of There
No Virus problems on my Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 box, versus the Windows XP/Vista crowd.
Get a real OS. http://www.debian.org/
liberare massarum ex ignorantia, clausa descendit molestie.
That's right, 1976. My friends and I used to attack each other over a HP timeshare system, infecting each other with keystroke recorders, DOS attacks against specific terminals, buffer overflow exploits that could be used to steal passwords, and programs that consumed all of another users storage space by creating hundreds of 1 byte files.
We never got caught for any of it, until one of our group found a way to change the addresses in the jump vector table for the kernel and hosed the mainframe for over a week. Even then, they did not know what he had done, they just wanted to know how he got the admin's password.
You can download the Bluescreen screensaver directly from Microsoft themselves! It's better than your method, because bumping the mouse doesn't do anything like it would normally; you have to hit a key. And, it "restarts" itself manually, even reading NTOSKRNL to find the bootscreen, so that if it's a modified boot screen, or a different version of Windows, it still works. My favorite download all time on microsoft.com. Perfect for April 1.
*Well, sysinternals made it, but Microsoft bought them out, so now they distribute it.
Don't even mention that thing. I thought it would be cool, downloaded and ran it a few times but the fucking thing always bluescreened when I activated it.
It took me a few reboots to think "wait a minute, the BSOD screensaver BSODs? Goddamnit"...
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
Inspired from
http://www.elkcloner.com/
For the younger set: the virus used to take over the screen with the text "I'm the cookie monster - I want a cookie". Then "Cookie Cookie Cookie". You had to type in "COOKIE" to stop it.
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday to viruses,
Hap...
Fatal Error: HappyBirthday.exe has been corrupted. Please contact your system administrator.
[OK]
"A deadlock has been reached. One task must die. We must now choose between murder and suicide."
I sincerely hope you didn't actually think those were real BSODs. I hope you're just joking...
If it did real BSODs, that would be a problem, but I doubt that it would actually do that.
Carlos Mencia has a descriptive word for you.....
In 1974 at McGill in Montreal my friend and I decided to write a self-propagating program on the 360 model 75 in use at the time. It would spawn itself via the HASP internal reader and print out huge banners with uncomplimentary remarks regarding the head of the data center on the dozen or so printers around town. It took the data center by surprise and it took them most of a day to figure out how to purge it. We were caught and fined. Justice was done but we may have had the honors of creating one of the first viruses. Needless to say personal computers were years away. While I would kick the crap out of anyone I caught writing virus software today I will never forget the thrill of that experience.
That would mean that Microsoft innovated SOMETHING in the modern era. Not possible. But, it may be the SECOND virus....
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
I was replying to the comment my post was in reply to, not the main article. Geez, mod it off-topic if you have to, but save some for the GP.
We've secretly replaced Slashdot with new Folgers Crystals - let's see if it notices.
I was kind of absent-minded, just running a new screensaver and seeing a BSOD. Only later did I realize what the screensaver was supposed to do :P
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.