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The fisrt virus
The first virus appeared in the late 1960’s and 1970’s.
Periodically on the mainframes at that period of time there appeared programs called "the rabbit".
These programs cloned themselves.
The first incident of "a computer virus", happened on the Univax 1108 system. -
The Creeper Virus
"The Creeper" virus created under the Tenex operating system used global computer networks to spread itself. The virus was capable of entering a network by itself by modem and transfer a copy of itself to remote system. "The Reeper" anti-virus program was created to fight this virus, it was the first known anti-virus program. -
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The 1980's
Computers become more and more popular. An increasing number of program appears written not by software companies but by private persons, moreover, these programs may be freely distributed and exchanged through general access servers - BBS. As a result there appears a huge number of miscellaneous "Trojan horses", programs, doing some kind of harm to the system when started. -
The Elk Cloner Virus
"Elk Cloner" bootable virus epidemics started on Apple II computers. The virus attached itself to the boot sector of diskettes to which there were calls. It showed itself in many ways - turned over the display, made text displays blink and showed various messages. -
Brain Virus
The first IBM PC virus "Brain" pandemic began. This virus infecting 360 KB diskettes became spread over the world almost momentarily. The virus was created in Pakistan by brothers Basit and Amjad Farooq Alvi. They left a text message inside the virus with their name, address and telephone number. According to the authors of the virus they were software vendors, and would like to know the extent of piracy in their country. Unfortunately their experiment left the borders of Pakistan.
It is also in -
Vienna Virus
"Vienna" virus appears. Ralph Burger, whom we already now, gets a copy of this virus, disassembles it, and publishes the result in his book "Computer Viruses: a High-tech Disease". Burger's book made the idea of writing viruses popular, explained how to do it, and therefore stimulated creating up hundreds and in thousands of computer viruses, in which some of the ideas from his book were implemented. -
Several Different Viruses
On Friday the 13 1988 several companies and universities in many countries of the world "got acquainted" with the "Jerusalem" virus. On that day the virus was destroying files which were attempted to be run. Probably this is one of the first MS-DOS viruses which caused a real pandemic, there were news about infected computers from Europe, America and the Middle East. Incidentally the virus got its name after one of the places it stroke - the Jerusalem University. "Jerusalem" together with sever -
Datacrime and FuManchu viruses
New viruses "Datacrime", "FuManchu" appear, as do the whole families like "Vacsina" and "Yankee". The first one acted extremely dangerously - from October 13th to December 31st it formatted hard disks. This virus "broke free" and caused total hysteria in the mass media in Holland and Great Britain. September 1989: 1 more anti-virus program begins shipping - IBM Anti-virus. October 1989: one more epidemic in DECNet, this time it was worm virus called "WANK Worm". December 1989: an incident wit -
Many Different Viruses
This year brought several notable events. The first one was the appearance of the first polymorphic viruses "Chameleon" (a.k.a. "V2P1", "V2P2", and "V2P6"). Until then the anti-virus programs used "masks" - fragments of virus code - to look for viruses. After "Chameleon"'s appearance anti-virus program developers had to look for different methods of virus detection. The second event was the appearance of Bulgarian "virus production factory": enormous amounts of new viruses were created in Bulga -
Computer Viruses Grow and Populate
Computer virus population grows continuously, reaching several hundreds now. Anti-viruses also show increasing activity: two software monsters at once (Symantec and Central Point) issue their own anti-virus programs - Norton Anti-virus and Central Point Anti-virus. They are followed by less known anti-viruses from Xtree and Fifth Generation. In April a full-scale epidemic broke out, caused by file and boot polymorphic virus called "Tequila", and in September the same kind of story happened with -
Viruses Virtually Forgotten
Non-IBM PC and non-MS-DOS viruses are virtually forgotten: "holes" in global access network are closed, errors corrected, and network worm viruses lost the ability to spread themselves. File-, boot- and file-boot viruses for the most widely spread operating system (MS-DOS) on the most popular computer model (IBM PC) are becoming more and more important. The number of viruses increases in geometrical to progression; various virus incidents happen almost every day. Miscellaneous anti-virus program -
Virus Makers Start Doing Serious Damage
Virus makers are starting to do some serious damage: besides hundreds of mundane viruses which are no different than their counterparts, besides the whole polymorphic generators and construction sets, besides new electronic editions of virus makers there appear more and more viruses, using highly unusual ways of infecting files, introducing themselves into the system etc. The main examples are: "PMBS", wording in Intel 80386 protected mode.
"Strange" (or "Hmm") - a "masterpiece" of Stealth tech