PLEXTOR SOFTWARE INFECTED VIRUS PC
It wasn’t until 1986 that the first real Windows PC virus was caught in the wild, and it was called “ Brain.” Brain, much like the viruses that came before it, was more or less harmless, although it did slow floppy disks to a crawl and take up a good chunk of memory, as well as enable the creators to track the infected devices.
Every program that gets infected may also act as a virus and thus the infection grows.” The first PC virus: BrainĮvery virus before this point was for lesser-known operating systems, at least by today’s standards. 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. It was also around this time, 1983, that the term “computer virus” was coined by Fred Cohen, whose very first published academic paper was indeed called “ Computer Viruses - Theory and Experiments.” In his paper, he described a computer virus as “a program that can 'infect' other programs by modifying them to include a possibly evolved copy of itself. Although apparently he had a habit of doing these kinds of things, as his friends soon learned to stop trading floppy disks with him. It was crafted as a prank by future entrepreneur Rich Skrenta as a 15-year-old high schooler, and all you really had to do was reboot the computer to continue using it as normal. Sounds pretty scary, right? Well, while it was certainly annoying, it was actually designed to be fairly harmless. Worse still, when you booted up the infected game for the 50th time, then your screen would go black and you’d see this message:Įlk Cloner: The program with a personality
There, it would infect the main computer and any other floppy disks inserted into it, so it could spread. Like most viruses before the prevalence of the internet, the only way to “catch” Elk Cloner was to slide in an infected floppy disk, which was usually loaded with a game. The first virus found and recorded “in the wild” was called Elk Cloner, which ironically targeted Apple ll computers. Of course, both Creeper and Reaper were very self-contained, sticking to the internal BBN network. In that respect, Ray Tomlinson is the father of both the modern virus and the first antivirus. But ol’ Ray wasn’t about to let his new creation run wild: to counteract it, he invented another virus called THE REAPER, which had the sole purpose of finding any computer infected by Creeper, and deleting the offending virus. Later, Thomas’s colleague Ray Tomlinson decided to give the Creeper an update, causing it to not only move automatically, but also self-replicate, leaving a copy of itself on a computer before moving onto the next one.
Instead it just scanned to see if there was another computer it could move to, and hopped over to it. While an infected computer would display "I'M THE CREEPER : CATCH ME IF YOU CAN,” the Creeper virus didn’t actually cause any damage to the system. It was developed by a man named Bob Thomas, who worked at a company called BBN Technologies, as a demonstration of mobile applications – software that could automatically hop between computers on a network. While it certainly had a disquieting name, the Creeper virus was, in truth, anything but. By today’s standards it would be classified as a “worm” since it was able to spread to other computers using local connections. Those ideas were finally put into practice in 1971 with the world’s first virus, the Creeper.
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