Top Computer Viruses
The weird history of the computer virus
There have been a couple of worms doing the rounds in Australia and the Netherlands.
But computer bugs have been around since the birth of the modern computer.
The term worm was inspired by the tapeworm monster in John Brunner’s novel, The Shockwave Rider and was coined for use by workers at Xerox PARC in 1979. It refers to any multi-segmented computation spread over multiple computers.
Self-replicating programs can be traced back to as early as 1949 when mathematician John von Neumann envisioned specialised computers which could replicate copies of themselves and pass on their programming to linked and associated machines.
Early viruses were targeted mostly to MS DOS. Perhaps the first and certainly the most notable was Creeper written by Bob Thomas at BBN in 1971.
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7. Creeper
Creeper infected PDP-11 computers connected to ARPANET, the Defence Department-run precursor to the Internet.
Infected computers would display the message, “I’m the creeper, catch me if you can!”
Creeper was rather a pioneer or anti-hero of the computing world. It was self-replicating but not too dangerous even if it was the godfather of the modern computer virus and an annoying bastard of a feature in modern technology.
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6. Elk Cloner
The Elk Cloner was created in 1982 by a high school student called Rich Skrenta who has since gone on to carve out a nice living in computer games and systems management.
Young Skrenta was looking for ways to annoy friends he traded shared software and computer games with and started altering floppy discs to display taunting messages or otherwise corrupt his friend’s machines.
Elk Cloner spread when a computer booted up with an infected disc inside it which would seize the computer’s memory. When an uninfected disc was inserted into the computer, Elk Cloner would be copied to the clean disc, spreading onto the next machine it was inserted to.
An infected computer would display a short poem on every 50th boot.
Elk Cloner: The program with a personality
It will get on all your disks
It will infiltrate your chips
Yes, it’s Cloner!
It will stick to you like glue
It will modify RAM too
Send in the Cloner!
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5. Positive Virus
The consigliore to the godfather of the computer virus, the man who actually coined the word “virus” to describe the process of infecting a computer, was Fred Cohen – a USC graduate student – who wrote and demonstrated the first documented virus in November 1983.
Cohen wrote a parasitic application program that seized control of computer operations. Cohen also would go on to write many papers on the topic of computer viruses, including his noted works on positive viruses.
He created one such positive virus called the compression virus which would spread to all executable files on a computer “infecting” them, not to corrupt them but to make them smaller.
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4. The Sasser worm
Does anyone remember the Sasser worm of 2004? After the initial furore, it emerged that an 18 year old German computer science student had written it to drum up support for his mother’s PC Help website.
The virus caused the satellite communications of the news agency Agence France-Presse to cease and disabled the computer systems of U.S. flight company Delta Air Lines who then had to cancel a number of trans-atlantic flights The British coastguard, a Finnish bank, a Nordig insurance company, Goldman Sachs and Private Eye owner Ian Hislop were all affected by Sven Jaschan’s Virus.
The virus corrupted vulnerable versions of Windows XP and 2000 entering the system through a vulnerable network port like many other worms.
Sasser was able to connect to victims’ computers primarily through TCP ports 445 139. Within days there were variants of the worm Sasser.B, Sasser.C, and Sasser.D trying their luck against other vulnerable ports.
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3. US – Korean Cyber Attacks
Cast your mind back to July 2009, what was in the news?
Well – fans were screaming bloody murder as revelations about Michael Jackson’s drug habit were emerging. The country was suitably distracted by MJs death to forget about our economic struggle as a heat wave consumed London and gay sex was legalised in India.
Who remembers the crippling cyber attacks against the governments of South Korea and the USA?
These attacks were especially shrouded and widely thought to have been carried out by North Korea, yet this has never been proven.
The attacks were a coordinated hijack effort against government, news media, and financial websites in South Korea and the United States that maliciously accessed targeted websites with the intention of causing their servers to arrest due to sudden overload of traffic, this is known as a DDOS attack.
The first attack saw to America and the second and third waves of attack had a right good pop at south Korea, crippling many of their state divisions and financial institutions.
The estimated number of the hijacked computers in South Korea varies widely; but could have been as many as 166,000.
It is expected that the economic costs associated with the attack for the two nations were huge but neither has commented to substantiate how much they were taken for.
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2. The Morris Worm
The Morris worm or Internet worm was one of the first computer worms where the internet was used to carry the infected virus across its networks.
The Morris worm is the first worm to gain significant mainstream media attention and highlight the nature of web security.
The virus was written by Robert Morris of Cornell University where the virus was written in 1998. It was sent from another university, MIT, to hide its perpetrator.
Morris claimed the worm was written to not cause damage, but to gauge the size of the Internet. Yet the virus was more powerful than ever intended.
A computer could be infected multiple times and each additional process would slow the machine down and eventually knacker it.
The US Accountability Office put the damage at $10M–100M and the author of the virus was the first person to be tried and convicted of violating the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
After appeals he was sentenced to three years probation, 400 hours of community service, and a fine of $10,000. He is now an associate professor at MIT.
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1. ILOVEYOU
Remember the ILOVEYOU virus? This is the most costly virus to ever hit personal computer systems and one of the costliest following its effect on state and government machines.
ILOVEYOU masqueraded as an email from someone in your contacts book and upon opening an attachment, released the virus.
The attachment read, LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs
You would have been forgiven for opening the attachment as the engineers of the virus exploited the length of Outlook Express’s Subject field, knowing the ‘VBS’ at the end would be hidden on many computers and people would believe this to be a harmless text file.
Upon opening the virus multiplied and sent itself to all contacts in your address book, quickly damaging tens of millions of computers worldwide.
Believed to have started in the Philippines, the virus erupted on 4 March 2000; and quickly infected over 50 million computers in nine days.
It caused the CIA, Pentagon and British Parliament to shut down their computers and eventuially the damage worldwide was tolled at $5.5 billion.
