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."

Script kiddie age?

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

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?

Don't forget the Lehigh Virus

[R2.0]

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.

Re:Don't forget the Lehigh Virus

[rudegeek]

One of the first self propagating viruses

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. :-)

Maya Angelou eat your heart out!

[Pionus]

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.

Your computer is now stoned!

[CPE1704TKS]

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.

Not the oldest.

[ReallyEvilCanine]

I had an Atari 800 back in 1979. In 1980 I took a small piece of malware someone else wrote and turned it into a virus which would remain memory-resident and self-replicate. After formatting any diskette the victim inserted into the drive, it wrote a hidden file to infect any machine the disk was then used on. This was a payback for the people who were getting pirated software free and then turning around to sell it. I'm pretty sure I still have the source code for it somewhere.

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.

1988 Morris internet worm

[peter303]

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.

Really Not the oldest.

[Cassini2]

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]

Maybe not a virus....

[Ollabelle]

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.

Re:1988 Morris internet worm

[Anonymous Coward]

but the author forget to account for duplicates and circularities

Actually the story is a bit more interesting than this. The author did think about this, and even programmed the worm to ask a target system whether it was already infected, and if it was then it would decline to infect it again.

The flaw came in a deliberate modification of this strategy. Following this idea completely would make the worm easy to defeat, since you could just run a program that listened for the query and answered "yes" to keep the worm away. So he modified it slightly, so that if the worm got seven yes responses in a row, it would go ahead and infect the target anyway.

Seven turned out to be too small, the worm ended up infecting machines over and over and over again, and brought its targets to a standstill.

Re:Pretty sad!

[Retric]

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.

The first virus? I do not think so.

[Asmodai]

Sorry, but Creeper beat that Apple II virus by about 10 years.

http://www.viruslist.com/en/viruses/encyclopedia?c hapter=153310937 [viruslist.com]

Furthermore http://www.viruslist.com/en/viruses/encyclopedia?c hapter=153310910 [viruslist.com] states that such ideas and programs already started in the 40s and 50s.

This Was Not the First Virus

[Evil W1zard]

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.....)

Re:Pakistani Brain Virus

[Anonymous Coward]

While the two brothers did have a hardware store, they were NOT selling pirated software. They had had written a medical software and they wanted to discourage people from pirating their software.

I know because I my house is just just a few blocks away from their shop. I have met Basit (Don't know if he is the elder one or the younger one) and he is quite an easy-going, nice person. The brothers are still in business and are running an ISP these days.

When I was growing up in Pakistan, I knew US as the land of GI Joe and Spider Man. But we had the brothers that wrote the first PC virus and rocked the world!! What can I say, a teenager needs his heros :)

Re:Has this been done before?

[RallyNick]

So how do you screencap a BSOD?