Who came up with the first computer virus?

The very first viruses were harmless. These were experiments - one of the first “Creeper” viruses, which simply displayed the message “I'M A CREEPER: CATCH ME IF YOU CAN”. Their distribution was limited to home networks (Creeper existed on TENEX OS ). That was in 1971.

Now there are millions of viruses that spread through the Internet in any way - file distributions, e-mail, websites. When everything is connected with everything, viruses spread quickly. Virus protection is a profitable business .

It began rather slowly and much earlier than it was supposed. The first viruses spread via offline - they worked with diskettes and were transferred to them between computers. Who invented the virus?
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The first virus for Mac was written as a teenage joke. The first PC virus was made to combat piracy.

Elk cloner

In 1981 , Richard Skrenta was in grade 9. He was a very smart hooligan armed with an Apple II computer. Most of all he liked to mock peers about their pirated computer games. In 2000, in an interview, he said :

I joked at my peers by changing copies of pirated games so that they self-destruct after a certain number of launches. I handed out games, sat down on them, and then she suddenly stopped working and gave out some funny comment on the screen (a ninth-grader's sense of humor).

As a result, friends have ceased to allow Skrent to their floppy disks. He stopped borrowing games, everyone stopped playing his toys, etc. But he did not calm down. He began studying instructions and descriptions, trying to find a security hole in the Apple II. And he came up with a way to execute code without touching floppy disks.

“I thought of leaving a certain mark on the OS on a running school computer. If the next user did not restart the computer from his disk, his disk was exposed to my code. ”

He wrote the assembly language code in two weeks , and called it Elk Cloner. It became what was later called the “boot sector virus”. When an uninfected disk was inserted into the drive of an infected computer, it infected the disk by writing a copy of the virus to the boot sector. This code was automatically executed at boot. Bringing an infected disk to another computer, and booting from it, a person infected this computer with a copy of the virus.

The virus interfered with the computer a little, and on the 50th launch, instead of launching the program, would display a whole poem on the screen:

Elk Cloner: A Personality Program

Crawl through your discs
Penetrate your chips
Yes, this is cloner!
Stick like glue
Operative your correct
Send Cloner soon.

Due to the delay in the appearance of the program, it was immediately impossible to notice that it improved the chances of distribution. The epidemic lasted several weeks.

The program also reached Scratta’s teacher’s computer , who accused him of entering his office. The virus was picked up by the relatives of Skrenta from Baltimore (he himself lived in Pittsburgh), and many years later he heard about a case of infection of a computer belonging to some kind of sailor.

Brain

The first virus to spread on the IBM PC was the Brain virus. He also settled in the boot sector. It was written by brothers Basit and Amjad Farouk Alvi from Pakistan in 1986. They were 17 and 24 years old.

The brothers had a computer company, Brain Computer Services, and they wrote a virus to track pirated copies of their medical software. The pirate program ate RAM, slowed down the operation of the disk, and sometimes made it difficult to save data. On assurances of the brothers, she did not destroy the data. The program contained the following message:

Welcome to the Dungeon 1986 Basit & Amjad (pvt) Ltd. BRAIN COMPUTER SERVICES 730 NIZAB BLOCK ALLAMA IQBAL TOWN LAHORE-PAKISTAN PHONE: 430791,443248,280530. Beware of this VIRUS ... Contact us for vaccination ... $ # @% $ @ !!

Welcome to the dungeon ... Beware of this virus ... Contact us for treatment ...

In the title were indicated real contacts. When someone called them for help, they could identify the pirated copy. Also, the virus counted the number of copies made.
They discovered that piracy was widespread, and copies of their programs were distributed very far. Amjad says that their first call came from the United States, Miami.


Alvi brothers in 2011

This was the first of many calls from the United States. The problem turned out to be that Brain spread on other diskettes, and not just on copies of their program. There was even an epidemic of this virus at the University of Delaware in 1986, and then it appeared in many other places. No lawsuits were filed, but many wrote about it in the newspapers. The creators were even mentioned in Time Magazine in 1988.

The New York Times wrote in May 1988 : “The daring computer program, which appeared on the computers of the Providence Bulletin this month, destroyed the files of one correspondent and spread through diskettes throughout the entire network of the newspaper. Computer scientists believe that this is the first case of infection of a computer system of an American newspaper with such an audacious program, which is called a computer "virus".

The Alvi brothers had to change phones and remove contacts from later versions of the virus. They stopped selling the program in 1987 . Their company has grown into a telecommunications provider and now it is the largest provider in Pakistan. It is located all at the same address.

And now - Chaos

Scrant in 2012

Skrenta worked in the field of information security, and now he is the CEO of the company Blekko , which is engaged in search technology.

Although floppy disks are long gone, viruses in the boot sectors exist. Now they work with USB flash drives. Since physical media are less and less used to transfer data, experts are confident that the days of boot viruses are numbered.

The virus war has moved online. Skrenta said in an interview with The Register : “It's sad that there is such a big industry of antiviruses. We need to make more secure systems, and not to organize a multi-million dollar industry in order to clean up the existing ones. ”

Skrenta and the Alvi brothers do not feel guilty for starting a hell of malware around the world. “Jin would have gotten out of the bottle anyway,” Scrant wrote in a blog , “I was interested in being the first to let it out.”