- 20th anniversary of computer viruses -

[andsome]

- 20th anniversary of computer viruses -

Oxygen3 24h-365d, by Panda Software (http://www.pandasoftware.com)

Madrid, November 11, 2003 - The BBC reminds readers -at

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3257165.stm -, that this week is the

20th anniversary of the appearance of computer viruses, as dated from the

seminal study on this subject published by Fred Cohen in 1983.

Fred Cohen created the first viruses as practical experiments for part of

his thesis for a doctorate in Electrical Engineering. In his study, he

defined a computer virus as "a program that can 'infect' other programs by

modifying them to include a ... version of itself". According to the article

published by the BBC, Cohen presented the results of his research to a

security seminar on November 10, 1983.

Other origins of computer viruses could date back to the 1950s, when

computer pioneer John Von Neumann referred for the first time to

self-replicating programs in his essay: "Theory and Organization of

Complicates Automata". In those days it was unthinkable to generate a

self-replicating program, but Von Neumann set the technical basis for

developing such programs by inventing the concept of "stored programs",

which made it possible for programs and data to be stored together in

memory, and the code to be modified.

A decade later, three researchers at the Bell laboratories created a small

game called Core Wars. In this game, two programmers developed applications

that fought each other for space in memory. The winner took more memory than

its opponent or simply "annihilated" it. Programs tried to survive by using

attacking, stealth and replication techniques similar to those used by

present day computer viruses. In May 1984, the Scientific American magazine

distributed the game Core Wars, which allowed many of its readers to

experiment with it.

The official birth of harmful viruses -viruses capable of reproducing and

infecting other programs, computers or disks- took place in 1986. These

first viruses include Brain, which infected boot sectors of 5.25" floppy

disks and the infamous Jerusalem, a.k.a. Friday 13th, the first memory

resident virus. This virus went into action on Friday 13th and deleted

infected files.

NOTE: The address above may not show up on your screen as a single line.

This would prevent you from using the link to access the web page. If this

happens, just use the 'cut' and 'paste' options to join the pieces of the

URL.

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The 5 viruses most frequently detected by Panda ActiveScan, Panda Software's

free online scanner: 1)Bugbear.B; 2)Parite.B; 3)Blaster; 4)Klez.I; 5)Gibe.

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[expertec]

Interesting :o thanks for that Andsome :rolleyes: