A Short History of Computer Viruses

Computer Virous

Computers and 
computer users 
are under assault
 by hackers like 
never before, but 
computer viruses
 are almost as old as electronic computers
 themselves.
  Most people use the term “computer virus”
 to refer to all malicious software, which we call 
malware. Computer Viruses are actually just one
 type of malware, 
a self-replicating programs designed to spread
 itself from computer to computer. A virus is, in fact, 
the earliest 
known malware invented.

The following is a history of some of the most famous 
viruses and malware ever:

1949 – 1966 – Self-Reproducing Automata:
 Self-replicating programs were established in 
1949, to produce a large number of  viruses, 
 John von Neumann, whose known to be the 
“Father of Cybernetics”, wrote an article on the
 “Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata”
 that was published in 1966.

1959 – Core Wars: A computer game was
 programmed in Bell Laboratory by Victor 
Vysottsky, H. Douglas 
McIlroy 
and Robert P Morris. They named it Core Wars. In 
this game, infectious programs named organisms 
competed with the processing time of PC.

1971 – The Creeper: Bob Thomas developed an experimental self-replicating program. It accessed
 through ARPANET (The Advanced Research 
Projects Agency Network) and copied to a remote
 host systems
 with TENEX operating system. A message displayed
 that “I’m the creeper, catch me if you can!”. Another 
program named Reaper was created to delete the
 existing harmful program the Creaper.

1974 – Wabbit (Rabbit): This infectious program 
was developed to make multiple copies of itself on a computer clogging the system reducing the 
performance of the computer.

1974 – 1975 –  ANIMAL: John Walker developed 
a program called ANIMAL for the UNIVAC 1108. 
This was said to be a non-malicious Trojan that is
known to spread through shared tapes.

1981- Elk Cloner: A program called the “Elk Cloner”
 was developed by Richard Skrenta for the Apple II
 Systems. This was created to infect Apple DOS 3.3. 
These programs started to spread through files and 
folders that are transferred to other computers by
 floppy disk.

1983 – This was the year when the term “Virus” 
was coined by Frederick Cohen for the computer 
programs that are infectious as it has the tendency to replicate.

1986 –  Brain: This is a virus also known as the
 “Brain boot sector”, that is compatible with IBM PC 
 was programmed and developed by two Pakistani programmers Basit Farooq Alvi, and his brother,
 Amjad Farooq Alvi.

1987- Lehigh: This virus was programmed to infect command.com files from Yale University.

Cascade: This virus is a self-encrypted file virus
 which was the outcome of IBM’s own antivirus
 product.

Jerusalem Virus: This type of virus was first 
detected in the city of Jerusalem. This was
 developed to destroy all files in an infected 
computers on the thirteenth day that falls on a Friday.

1988 – The Morris Worm: This type of worm was 
created by Robert Tappan Morris to infect DEC VAX 
and Sun machines running BSD UNIX through the 
Internet.  This is best known for exploiting the
 computers that are prone to buffer overflow 
vulnerabilities.

1990 – Symantec launched one of the first antivirus
 programs called the Norton Antivirus, to fight 
against the infectious viruses. The first family
 of polymorphic virus called the Chameleon 
was developed by Ralf Burger.

1995 – Concept: This virus name Concept was
 created to spread and attack Microsoft Word documents.

1996 – A macro virus known as Laroux was 
developed to infect Microsoft Excel Documents, 
A virus named Baza was developed to infect
Windows 95 and Virus named Staog was created 
to infect Linux.

1998 – CIH Virus: The release of the first version
 of CIH viruses developed by Chen Ing Hau from
 Taiwan.

1999 – Happy99: This type of worm was developed
 to attach itself to emails with a message Happy 
New Year. Outlook Express and Internet Explorer 
on Windows 95 and 98 were affected.

2000 – ILOVEYOU: The virus is capable of deleting 
files in JPEGs, MP2, or MP3 formats.

2001 – Anna Kournikova: This virus was spread 
by emails to the contacts in the compromised 
address book of Microsoft Outlook. The emails
 purported to contain pictures of the very attractive
 female tennis player, but in fact hid a malicious virus.

2002 – LFM-926: This virus was developed to infect Shockware Flash files.

Beast or RAT: This is backdoor Trojan horse and is 
capable of infecting all versions of Windows OS.

2004 – MyDoom: This infectious worm also called the Novang. This was developed to share files and permits hackers to access to infected computers. It is known
 as the fastest mailer worm.

2005 – Samy XXA: This type of virus was developed
 to spread faster and it is known to infect the Windows
 family.

2006 – OSX/Leap-A: This was the first ever known 
malware discovered against Mac OS X.

Nyxem: This type of  worm was created to spread 
by mass-mailing, destroying Microsoft Office files.

2007 – Storm Worm: This was a fast spreading 
email spamming threat against Microsoft systems
 that compromised millions of systems.

Zeus: This is a type of Trojan that infects used 
capture login credentials from banking web sites
 and commit financial fraud.

2008 – Koobface: This virus was developed and
 created to target Facebook and MySpace users.

2010 – Kenzero: The is a virus that spreads online
 between sites through browsing history.

2013 – Cryptolocker: This is trojan horse encrypts 
the files infected  machine and demands a ransom
 to unlock the files.

2014 – Backoff: Malware designed to compromise
 Point-of-Sale (POS) systems to steal credit card data

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