Because their programs were often pirated, they created a virus that could infect the boot sector of pirated disks. But probably the most important of this generation of viruses was one that came to be known as Brain, and started spreading worldwide in 1986.īrain was developed by computer programmers (and brothers) Amjad and Basit Farooq Alvi, who lived in Pakistan and had a business selling medical software. The earliest example is Elk Cloner, which was created by a 15-year-old as a prank and infected Apple II computers. What malware did spread from computer to computer did so via floppy disks. Shortly after Creeper's release, Ray Tomlinson, best known for implementing the first email program, wrote a rival program called Reaper that spread from computer to computer eliminating Creeper's code.Ĭreeper was designed to leap across computer networks, but for most of the 1970s and '80s that infection vector was in limited simply because most computers operated in isolation.
Written in PDP-10 assembly language, Creeper could reproduce itself and move from computer to computer across the nascent ARPANET.Ĭreeper did no harm to the systems it infected-Thomas developed it as a proof of concept, and its only effect was that it caused connected teletype machines to print a message that said "I'M THE CREEPER: CATCH ME IF YOU CAN." We're mentioning it here despite its benign nature because it was the first, and set the template for everything that followed. Five years later, the first known computer virus, called Creeper, was a written by Bob Thomas. Petya ransomware/NotPetya wiper (2016/7)Ĭomputer pioneer John von Neumann's posthumous work Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata, which posited the idea of computer code that could reproduce and spread itself, was published in 1966.This article will take a look at some of the most important milestones in the evolution of malware: These entries each represent a novel idea, a lucky break that revealed a gaping security hole, or an attack that turned to be particularly damaging-and sometimes all three. And in truth, there have been computer viruses on the internet since before it was the internet. Viruses and other malware spreading for sinister or baffling reasons has been a staple of cyberpunk novels and real-life news stories alike for decades.
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