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The Computer Virus Turns 25 in July
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon Jul 16, 2007 09:19 AM
from the thats-silver-right dept.
from the thats-silver-right dept.
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."
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Imagine his wealth... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Imagine his wealth... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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Script kiddie age? (Score:5, Interesting)
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"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 w
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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
Re:Pretty sad! (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Parent
Answering my own question, sort of (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
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VIRUS WARNING:
Attention: Computer Labs Inc., makers of Virucide antivirus software have identified a highly dangerous new Trojan worm, MONKEYPOO. It will usually appear in an e-mail with the subject, "Congratulations.You have won!" it will then prompt you to click a link to collect your cash prize. It can also freely spread across networks.
Monkeypoo will read your address book, and mail a copy of itself to every address it finds, and it will look like you sent it. It will then in
Re:Answering my own question, sort of (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Script kiddie age? (Score:4, Insightful)
What this kid did was go into the the Apple internals and figure out how to do something himself. In hindsight it was not such a great feat, but is was a feat that was at least somewhat novel.
OTOH, kids have nothing but time on their hands and if the parents and schools don't keep them busy, then they find other ways to stay busy. The more cleaver one can produce some real havoc. What impresses me is the high school kid that does something creative and interesting with his or her free time, instead of being randomly malicious. The really good ones will go out and start applying their skills to the betterment of humanity, but really any bright kid that chooses a path that is not gratuitously destructive is a win in my opinion.
Parent
Don't forget the Lehigh Virus (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Don't forget the Lehigh Virus (Score:4, Interesting)
Still, sounds like something very harmless. You should see Amiga-related (not AmigaOS related as much of the population used Amiga as game console) viruses, like Saddam. I think orginal Saddam could be proud this piece of horrible software.
Then, with release of AmigaOS 2.04, we had new kind of viruses. They would spread like... er... viruses? They patched all systems calls dealing with resources loading and all your fonts, device drivers, libraries, executables was infected. I still remember Happy New Year 1996 -- it took me two days with no sleep to clean my disk. Anti-virus software that could deal with it was designed by someone who hated people. First, you passed what it should scan. Then, when process started, at every instance of virus it would start FROM THE TOP. And it would say "Oh, you have an virus. It was deleted. Continue?" You HAD to click it to start again. My Libs: directory had over 6500 shared libraries. All infected.
(Yes, I realize it was done to prevent from recursive infection. This should not be the case since all system vectors was checked all the time by the very same program.)
I think this guy was hired to do 'Allow or Cancel' component. :-)
Parent
Has this been done before? (Score:4, Funny)
Not a virus, just a prank but still
Re:Has this been done before? (Score:5, Funny)
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My personal preference is take the screen shot, flip it, then set that as the background. WinXP makes things easy because you can just right click and uncheck "show icons". I do it once or twice a year at work. Doesn't work so well anymore now that all PCs will lock themselves after 10 minutes of inactivity.
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The truly evil among us keep *SOME* of the icons on the desktop, and hide the rest away in another folder. Thus, some of the icons work, while the rest are just images. Truly infuriating!
One of the nice
Re:Has this been done before? (Score:5, Funny)
The guy was one of the types that always reminded you of his certifications. yet it took us telling him it was a screensaver to stop him from tearing apart his PC.
It was funnier than hell, he stopped chasing us with sharp objects about 4 days later.
Parent
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Re:Has this been done before? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
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It took me a few reboots to think "wait a minute, the BSOD screensaver BSODs? Goddamnit"...
Re:Has this been done before? (Score:4, Funny)
I miss that job!
Parent
The reason why Macs are so much more secure... (Score:5, Funny)
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Happy birthday! (Score:5, Funny)
Stealing thumder from the Mac users (Score:3, Funny)
Maya Angelou eat your heart out! (Score:2, Interesting)
Your computer is now stoned! (Score:4, Interesting)
McAfee (Score:2, Insightful)
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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.
It was most likely McAfee (back when it was shareware freely distributed via the BBS community).
I don't believe Norton got into the anti-virus market until much later (though at that time every geek worthy of the name *did* have a copy of Norton Utilities, most likely pirated).
I *liked* that virus. I was studying computers at the local community college, and printed out the assembly code for "stoned" to study. The top programmer at the electronics company I worked for spotted me reading the code, sat dow
Not the oldest. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Really Not the oldest. (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org]
Really Really Not the oldest. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
1988 Morris internet worm (Score:5, Interesting)
Um no. it wasn't (Score:4, Informative)
Bullshit! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bullshit! (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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Maybe not a virus.... (Score:2, Interesting)
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The first virus? I do not think so. (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.viruslist.com/en/viruses/encyclopedia?
Furthermore http://www.viruslist.com/en/viruses/encyclopedia?
still infecting...in emulators (Score:4, Informative)
Maybe I'll keep it around as a living pet in my emulator
This Was Not the First Virus (Score:4, Interesting)
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.....)