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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
Finally, you're old enough to rent a car.
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.
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
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.
As a CS degree holder who started programming at age 8 I see where you are coming from. But, I think you're missing out on many high quality programmers who started in other areas. Personally I find the most useful questions to separate talented from the useless are:
"What are your thoughts on the mythical man month?"
and
"Outside of work and school what are some interesting projects you have worked on?"
I know a lot great programmers without formal education, but I also know several excellent people who discovered programming in collage and actually know what they are doing.
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
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.
CS Graduates don't goto school. They instantiate a CSStudent (using a StudentFactory class). CSStudent implemnents a functor Notify callback as part of the abstract Student interface. Using the Observer pattern, they call the Attach method of the ConcreteSchool class which implements the School Interface. Then the ConcreteSchool class calls Notify and passes a Notification object containing a ConcreteClass object which the Student stores in a Dictionary class, Knowledge. In the examination Use Case, the Notify is called with a ExamNotification object containing a List of ExamQuestion objects. CSStudent intantiates an Iterator which iterates though the list and uses the Dictionary object's Lookup method to answer each question, calling before calling ExamNotification's Answer method.
After reception of a Graduation, ExamFailure or DrugsBust notification, the CSStudent destructor is called. This in turn calls the Knowledge destructor and the Knowledge Dictionary is deleted.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
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
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!
Yes, but it's a concept from a book that was written specifically about software development projects.
What's more, even a "code jockey" is going to be expected to give reasonable estimates of how much time it will take his team to complete a particular task. That's kind of what the MMM is all about.
So, thanks for playing, but if you can't be bothered to read one of the oldest and most respected books about your chosen career then I think it's fair for the recruiter to note that, at the very least, you don't read much.
Breakfast served all day!
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.
I feel like death on a soda cracker.
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."