History of Computer Viruses
Primitive 1970s
* The Creeper virus was an experimental self-replicating program written by Bob Thomas at BBN in 1971.[1] Creeper infected DEC PDP-10 computers ceaseless the TENEX operating system. Creeper gained access via the ARPANET and copied itself to the remote system where the message, "I'm the creeper, snag me if you can!" was displayed. The Reaper program was created to delete Creeper.
1974
* The Wabbit virus was not really a virus but more of a fork batter, a program that multiplies copies of itself on a single computer, named for the speed at which it clogged the system with copies of itself, reducing system performance, before reaching a start and crashing.
1975
* ANIMAL was a popular game written for the UNIVAC 1108 which asked a number of questions to the narcotic addict in an attempt to guess the type of animal that the user was thinking of. When run, the related program PERVADE would also create a reproduction of itself and ANIMAL in every directory to which the current user had access. It spread across the multi-user UNIVACs when users with overlapping permissions discovered the trick, and to other computers when tapes were shared. The program was carefully written to avoid damage to existing file or directory nature, and to not copy itself if permissions did not exist or if damage could result. Its spread was therefore halted by an OS upgrade which changed the format of the alphabetize status tables that PERVADE used for safe copying. Though non-malicious, "Pervading Animal" represents the first Trojan "in the raging".
1980-1989
1980
* Jürgen Kraus wrote his master thesis "Selbstreproduktion bei Programmen" (self-reproduction of programs)
1981
* A program called Elk Cloner, written for Apple II systems and created by Richard Skrenta. Apple II was seen as uncommonly vulnerable due to the storage of its operating system on floppy disk. Elk Cloner's...
