Twenty-five years ago, two brothers in Pakistan came up with one of the greatest annoyances in the modern world. Basit and Amjad Farooq Alvi developed the first major personal computer malware “Brain” in 1986 at their Lahore, Pakistan computer shop. Brain spread eventually spread across the world, one infected floppy disk at a time.
– See Part 1 Here – See Part 2 Here – See Part 3 Here – See Part 4 Here
Brain was the first of what became known as “stealth viruses.” Because most 1980s computers only had tiny internal hard drives or none at all, everything had to be run from floppy disks. Brain would bury itself in the part of the disk necessary for running programs and infect any computer it ran into. It would then sit in the computer’s memory and infect new disks inserted into that machine as well. While Brain was relatively harmless, it was the mother of all viruses, which spawned a host of malicious malware.
Robert Slade, a senior instructor at the International Information System Security Certification Consortium (ISC2) told News.Com, Australia:
… the virus itself spreads far and wide without any reference to the original media and programs they were selling … Because this was a boot sector infector, it just spread on to any floppy disk that had been put into an infected machine.
There has been a great deal of speculation about why the brothers created the virus. So on the 25th anniversary, F-Secure (FSC1V) researcher Mikko Hypponen, who was among the first to analyze Brain, decided to track down the Farooq brothers and ask them about their groundbreaking work. Mr. Hypponen originally reverse-engineered the virus and discovered a short block of text with the phone number and address of the place where it was created buried within Brain’s code. Amazingly enough, the brothers are still working at their company, Brain Telecommunications, which is still headquartered at the same Pakistan address near Lahore Railway Station listed in the virus code.
During the interview, the brothers explained how and why they created Brain, adding that they wrote the code primarily as an experiment to see how far it could spread via floppy disk. The brothers, who are now successful businessmen in Lahore, were quick to point out that Brain wasn’t destructive, and explicitly distanced themselves from the more malicious viruses that have sprung up in the past quarter of a century. To the Farooqs, today’s malware is rooted in pure criminality — something they denounce, but don’t feel entirely responsible for spawning. As they pointed out, if they hadn’t created the world’s first PC virus, someone else surely would have.
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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.
TechChrunch says “Not too surprisingly, Sony cites rapidly plunging demand as the reason” Floppy disk (demand peaked in 1995 and has shrunk more than 90% since.