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Essay on Computer Viruses
The term Virus was not used to describe a self-replicating computer program until the American electrical engineer named Fred Cohen associated the term with it in 1983. In the 1950s at Bell Laboratories, John von Neumann’s theory in which he made in 1949 was put to the test. His theory stated that it was theoretically possible for a computer program to replicate. His theory was tested after a game called Core Wars was developed whereby players created tiny computer programs that attacked, erased, and tried to propagate on an opponent s system.
In the late 1960s through to the early 1970s, the program called ‘The Rabbit’ was constantly appearing on the mainframes at the time. These programs cloned themselves, occupied system resources, thus lowering the productivity of the system. These viruses were only localized, as they did not spread from one system to another and are thought to have only been pranks or mistakes by programmers (Nanc, 167-175).
The Univac 1108 and IBM 360/370 systems were infected with one of the first known computer viruses, ‘Pervading Animal’. This virus attached itself to executable files, which damaged the infected file. In 1986 the first stealth virus hit IBM Compatible PC s, called the BRAIN virus. The fact that it was Stealth meant that it was undetectable, and if there was an attempt to read the infected sector, the virus substituted it with a clean original one (Kephart, Sorkin, Chess, White, 88).
It originated in Pakistan and was made by two brothers Basit and Amjad Farooq Alvi who were software vendors. The purpose of their virus was to find out the extent of piracy in their country, and it left a text message with their name, address and telephone number. This virus was spread by infected 360kb diskettes, and had infected IBM PC s worldwide by 1987. The viruses Stone and Internet Worm appeared in 1988.
