Happy birthday dear virus: 25 this month
1 min read
Although most computer users with long memories think the first computer viruses appeared in the mid-1980s, the first recorded was in July 1982, way before IBM unveiled its first PC on an unsuspecting public.
The first virus was the Elk Cloner, apparently created by a high school student from Pittsburgh, which propagated between Apple II computers via floppy disk.
Elk Cloner’s payload was a verse of poetry, but it started what has become a stream of malware that first popped up on the screens of Apple II, BBC Micro and, later, early PC users’ screens.
“Back then it was just a prank; a bit of fun,” says Phil Higgins, senior partner with IT security firm Brookcourt Solutions. “Today’s malware is frequently malevolent and coded by criminals and/or hackers who are intent on extracting money from – as well as destroying the data of – innocent computer users and the organisations they work for.
“An example of this is the MPack tool kit, which is being used by criminals to infect legitimate websites and then deliver a crime-ware payload to unsuspecting visitors. Reports indicate that MPack is being used by cyber criminals to control tens of thousands of websites and infect hundreds of thousands of corporate and individual users,” he warns.
“It’s always nice to remember an anniversary, but this is one date that both business and PC users should use to galvanise themselves into raising the bar on their information security and ensuring that any malware doesn’t get through their security screens,” he adds.
