The Computer Virus
It is that moment of dread for all users of computer software, the realization that your device has somehow become infected by some form of computer virus. Even large organisations with, you would imagine, sophisticated firewall and security devices are not immune to the threat and the reputational and financial repercussions can be significant. Think of the recent problems Marks and Spencer had with their online ordering system.
The concept of a virus is almost as old as computing itself. The idea that a “mechanical” organism such as a piece of computer code could damage machines, copy itself, and infect new hosts, just like a biological virus, was first raised in a paper entitled Theory of Self-Producing Automata by the mathematician, John van Neumann, in 1966, developing upon a concept he had floated in a series of lectures in the late 1940s.
The first actual computer virus is widely acknowledged to have been the Creeper program, developed in 1971 by Bob Thomas of BBN, although it had no malicious intent, simply designed to establish whether a self-replicating program was possible. As each new hard drive was infected, Creeper would try to remove itself from the previous host and simply displayed the message “I’m the Creeper. Catch me if you can!”.
A malicious computer virus first made it appearance with the Rabbit or Wabbit virus, developed in 1974. Once in a computer, it made multiple versions of itself quickly, hence its name, severely impacting the performance of the system and eventually crashing the machine.
A Trojan virus is something which hides in another program and carries out other actions without the user’s permission. In 1975 “animal programs” in which players were invited to guest the animal a user was thinking of by asking up to twenty questions were wildly popular but sharing versions meant creating and sending magnetic tapes to other users. A programmer, John Walker, solved the problem by creating a piece of software, ANIMAL, but included within it another piece of software, PERVADE, which worked behind the scenes to help its host spread from place to place.
Unlike many modern day Trojan viruses, PERVADE and ANIMAL were not intended to harm anyone. Indeed, PERVADE was carefully designed so that it did not delete or damage any files, did not copy itself to places where it was not allowed, and it stopped working if replicating itself could cause harm. For the other users, if that was the cost of gaining easy access to ANIMAL, so be it. However, a dangerous template had been created.
With the advent of personal computers, my first was almost the size of my desk top, new opportunities to introduce viruses presented themselves. Brain, generally considered the first PC virus, began infecting 5.2 inch floppy disks – remember them? – in 1986. The handiwork of Basit and Amjad Farooq Alvi, who running a computer store in Pakistan were tired of customers making illegal copies of their software. Brain replaced the boot sector of a floppy disk with a virus which contained a hidden copyright message, although it did not corrupt any data, making it also the first stealth virus.
