Science fiction writer David Gerrold wrote “When H.A.R.L.I.E. Was One" and published it in 1972. In it, a computer program called “VIRUS" spreads from computer to computer, before it is finally killed by another program, appropriately called “VACCINE." Just like communication satellites, moon landings, and waterbeds, science fiction predicted the future.
The first program to actually spread from one computer to another appeared around the same time. The Creeper virus infected a system across the Arpanet, the network of computers that eventually became the Internet we know today. Interestingly enough, the Reaper program designed to kill the Creeper virus was also a virus.
The first wide-scale virus infection was Elk Cloner on the Apple II computer system in 1981. Since the Apple II kept it’s operating system on floppy disk, it was very easy to infect the system, and a surprisingly large number of viruses were written for Apple computers.
Five years later, the first PC viruses began to appear, starting with The Pakistani Brain. It was written by a pair of brothers in Pakistan.
1987 saw the first boot-sector viruses, such as Yale, Ping Pong, and Stoned. Boot sector viruses infect a computer if an infected disk is left in the drive with the power off. The Jerusalem virus also appeared that same year, and was one of the first viruses to have a destructive payload�"if the virus was running on Friday the 13th, it would ruin all executable files on the computer.
Robert Tappan Morris made computer history in 1988. His computer worm was one of the first to exploit “Buffer Overrun" errors, and spread rapidly across the network. It would run multiple times on infected systems, eventually crowding out anything else on that system. The worm brought the Internet to it’s knees until it was found and removed.
In 1989, for example, Ghostball was released. This was the first virus able to attack different kinds of targets. Before Ghostball, viruses were classified by their attack, like “file infector" or “boot sector virus." Ghostball was the first Multipartite virus, because it could follow several attack patterns.
In 1990, a programmer named Mark Washburn demonstrated a Polymorphic virus.called 1260. This virus could actually change the structure of it’s own code�"meaning, every time it infected a new system, it looked different while doing the same thing. In effect, this kind of virus “hides" from anti-virus software by wearing disguises.
Michelangelo was the first virus to achieve stardom. It was discovered in 1991, and was predicted to cause incredible amounts of damage when it reached it’s trigger date, March 6th, 1992 (March 6th is Michelangelo’s birthday). If an infected system is booted on March 6th, the virus will erase the hard drive. Despite doomsday warnings made by the press and the antivirus industry of “at least five million infected systems at risk," only about 10,000-20,000 computers worldwide were hit by the virus.
The Concept virus was discovered in 1995. Concept is short for “Proof of Concept," and it was designed to show how viruses could be written in the macro language programmed into Microsoft Word. By 2004, roughly 75% of all viruses are macro viruses.
The CIH virus, later renamed “Chernobyl," appeared in 1998. This was a very damaging virus that was not only programmed to erase hard drives but also tried to erase BIOS chips. For the first time in history, a virus had managed to actually damage the hardware it was running on. Fortunately, CIH wasn’t very good at it, and only damaged a handful of systems.
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