Wikipedia computer virus timeline

The Melissa Virus. May 4, On an infected system, the virus searches address books for email addresses, and sends a copy of itself. Sep 18, In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, Nimda exploded onto the Internet.

It used several different attack vectors to spread itself, including email, web browsers via infected sites , network shares, Microsoft vulnerabilities, and holes left from previous virus attacks. It's name is actually "admin" spelled backwards.

It was the fastest-spreading virus of its time. Memories of the Nimda virus. As a result, modern malware began to take shape. The threat landscape became a mixed environment shared by viruses, worms and Trojans—hence the name "malware" as an umbrella term for malicious software. One of the most serious epidemics of this new era was the LoveLetter, which appeared on May 4, As Securelist notes, it followed the pattern of earlier email viruses of the time, but unlike the macro viruses that had dominated the threat landscape since , it didn't take the form of an infected Word document, but arrived as a VBS file.

It was simple and straightforward, and since users hadn't learned to be suspicious of unsolicited emails, it worked. Since the message often came to new victims from someone familiar, they were more likely to open it, making ILOVEYOU a proof-of-concept for the effectiveness of social engineering.

The Code Red worm was a "file less" worm—it existed only in memory and made no attempt to infect files on the system. Taking advantage of a flaw in the Microsoft Internet Information Server, the fast-replicating worm wreaked havoc by manipulating the protocols that allow computers to communicate and spread globally in just hours. Eventually, as noted in Scientific American , compromised machines were used to launch a distributed denial of service attack on the Whitehouse.

Instead it just scanned to see if there was another computer it could move to, and hopped over to it. In that respect, Ray Tomlinson is the father of both the modern virus and the first antivirus. There, it would infect the main computer and any other floppy disks inserted into it, so it could spread. Elk Cloner: The program with a personality It will get on all your disks It will infiltrate your chips Yes, it's Cloner!

Sounds pretty scary, right? Well, while it was certainly annoying, it was actually designed to be fairly harmless. It was crafted as a prank by future entrepreneur Rich Skrenta as a year-old high schooler, and all you really had to do was reboot the computer to continue using it as normal. Although apparently he had a habit of doing these kinds of things, as his friends soon learned to stop trading floppy disks with him. With the infection property, a virus can spread throughout a computer system or network using the authorizations of every user using it to infect their programs.

Every program that gets infected may also act as a virus and thus the infection grows. While it took advantage of an exploit in the Microsoft operating system, it was never really designed to be a virus. Created by two brothers, Basit Farooq Alvi and Amjad Farooq Alvi, Brain was designed to protect their medical software from being pirated.

They even had a message in the code that included their address and phone numbers so they could fix any infected machines.

And yet, because the floppy it came on was so frequently stolen, they were astonished to find themselves swamped with requests to remove Brain from a lot of infected devices. Viruses really started to become a problem in the late s, as computers became more commonplace and people began to really experiment with the kind of shenanigans they could get into with malicious code. One of the products of this experimental age was the Vienna virus, which was a fairly harmful beast: when it infected a device, it would corrupt data and destroy files, seemingly for no reason other than to cause problems and grief for people running DOS devices.

It was just one of many such viruses in this time, but it was problematic enough that in , a man named Brend Fix was tasked by Rolf Burger, a fellow computer scientist and author, to find a way to neutralize it.

Thankfully, through some hard work, Brent Fix was able to live up to his last name and fix the issue, creating the very first dedicated antivirus software , which was able to detect and destroy the Vienna virus before it could cause any damage. Still, soon afterwards, others would be inspired and start designing their own programs to stop viruses, starting a game of cat and mouse between rival groups of hackers that has continued to this very day.

Up until this point, viruses only really existed for the entertainment of those who made them. They were purely a hobby, and the idea of actually making money off malicious software was hypothetical at best. Next came the Ordovician period. This period lasted for about 45 million years and saw modern sea life start to form.

Next came one of the shortest periods in terms of evolution, the Silurian Period which only lasted about 28 million years. During this time a warm climate and high sea level allowed coral reefs and sponges to thrive. This spiral graph shows the next periods of life from the Devonian period, Mississippian period, Pennsylvanian period, Permian period, Triassic period, and Jurassic period.

This may be one of the most familiar periods because everyone knows and loves the dinosaurs. What you may not know is that dinosaurs actually made a comeback during this period after they nearly went extinct at the end of the Triassic period. The Jurassic period also saw the development of oysters, crabs, lobsters, crocodiles, sharks, and bony fish.

Share Tweet. Click below to zoom Researchers agree that the first computer virus was circulated back in Related Topics:.

Continue Reading. You may like. Click to comment. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published.