Bach Seat

2011 marks the 40th anniversary of the computer virus. Help Net Security notes that over the last four decades, malware instances have grown from 1,300 in 1990, to 50,000 in 2000, to over 200 million in 2010. Fortinet (FTNT) marks this dubious milestone with an article that counts down some of the malware evolution low-lights.

The Sunnyvale, CA network security firm says that viruses evolved from academic proof of concepts to geek pranks which have evolved into cybercriminal tools. By 2005, monetization of the virus scene was underway and almost all viruses developed for the sole purpose of making money via more or less complex business models. According to FortiGuard Labs, the most significant computer viruses over the last 40 years are:

– See Part 1 Here – See Part 2 Here  – See Part 3 Here  – See Part 4 Here

1945 – A Bug is Born –  Grace Murray Hopper, a researcher at Harvard, notes a system failure and finds a moth trapped in relay panels.

1949 – Self-replicating programs – John von Newman a researcher from Hungary published the theoretical base for computers that store information in their “memory”.

1962 – A group of Bell Telephone Labs researchers invents a game that destroys software programs.

1971 – The Creeper Virus appears on ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet. It replicates itself and displays a message: “I’m the Creeper: Catch Me if You Can.”

1974 – The Wabbit – was a self-replicating program, that made multiple copies of itself on a computer until it bogs down the system to such an extent that system performance is reduced to zero and the computer eventually crashes. This virus was named wabbit because of the speed at which it was able to replicate.

1981 – Elk Cloner – the first widespread virus on the Apple (AAPL) II platform, spreads by the floppy disk and infects boot sectors, generating messages and impairing performance.

1983 –  The term “computer virus” comes into vogue after Professor Len Adleman at Lehigh University demonstrates the concept at a seminar.

1986 – The Brain is the first global epidemic on the PC platform and shows businesses and consumers are clueless about protection.

1987 – Jerusalem virus – On any Black Friday (Friday the 13th), it would delete any programs that were run, instead of infecting them, so it simply couldn’t be ignored,” Roger Thompson told News.com, Australia. “You couldn’t throw away your hard drive, and reformatting it didn’t remove the virus,” the chief research officer for AVG said.

1988 – The Morris worm – created by Robert Tappan Morris, infects DEC VAX and Sun machines running BSD UNIX connected to the Internet and becomes the first worm to spread extensively “in the wild”, and one of the first well-known programs exploiting buffer overrun vulnerabilities.

1990 – Chameleon– the first documented polymorphic virus, malware that adapts and changes to avoid detection.

1992 – Michelangelo – was expected to create a digital apocalypse on March 6, with millions of computers having their information wiped according to mass media hysteria surrounding the virus.  Later assessments of the damage showed the aftermath to be minimal.

1995 –  Concept – the first Macro virus attacked Microsoft (MSFT) Word documents.

1996 – Laroux – the first Microsoft (MSFT) Excel virus, appears in the wild.

1999 – The Happy99 worm – invisibly attached itself to emails and would display fireworks to hide the changes being made then wished the user a happy New Year. It modified system files related to Microsoft (MSFT) Outlook Express and Internet Explorer (IE) on Windows 95 and Windows 98.

1999 – The Melissa worm targeted Microsoft (MSFT) Word and Outlook-based systems, and created considerable network traffic.

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Back in the day, I had to deal with both Happy99 and Melissa, as well as the occasional Stoned. Melissa was the easiest to deal with since I was running a GroupWise shop at the time, once the news spread, we just pulled the Cat5 from the GWIA and we saw minimal blowback. Let’s hear it for technological diversity.

Related articles

• Anatomy of a Computer Virus (freetech4teachers.com)
• More Mac malware – top tips for avoiding infection (nakedsecurity.sophos.com)
• Combating Viruses: Software Comparison and Guidance (brighthub.com)

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.