computer virus

A Brief Look at the History of Computer Viruses Computer viruses are relatively new and started to emerge and upgrade soon after the Internet appeared. The history of computer viruses show us that the founding blocks of computer viruses were laid in 1949, when scientist John von Neumann came up with the theory about self-replicating programs. In 1969, AT&T Bell Laboratories come up with the first multi-tasking operating system, UNIX, and, in the same year, ARPANET is developed by the Advanced Research Projects Agency. This was the precursor of the Internet. Let us look back in time at the interesting history of computer viruses. In 1979, engineers at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center make a huge discovery: the computer worm. This rudimentary program is the ancestor of modern computer worms and is designed to search for idle processors in a network. In 1983, Fred Cohen of the University of Southern California comes up with the term “computer virus” to describe a program that is created to "affect other computer programs by modifying them in such a way as to include a (possibly evolved) copy of itself." In 1986, the first PC virus, codename “The Brain” is released from Pakistan. In 1988 came the first devastating attack against ARPANET computers. Robert Morris, 23, created a small virus that infected almost 6,000 computers on the network and flooded them with copies of itself. In 1991, Symantec develops the Norton Anti-Virus software as a way of protecting computers from viruses. CREATOR Melissa (computer virus) PURPOSE To Take Control of a Computer and Use It for Specific Tasks This is the most common type of virus, which is better classified as a trojan. These types of viruses are usually downloaded unknowingly by the computer user thinking that the file is something else, such as a file sent from a instant messenger friend or email attachment. Once the host computer has been infected (known as a zombie computer), the trojan joins a private chat channel and awaits orders from its “Zombie Master”. This Zombie Master who is often the virus creator, will gather thousands of infected machines called a botnet and use them to mount attacks on web servers. The Zombie Master can command each of these infected computers will send a tiny bit of information to a web server – because there are potentially thousands of computers doing this at once, it often overloads the server. The Zombie Master may want to do this to another website because it is a rival website, a figurehead website (such as whitehouse.gov) or it may be part of an extortion plan. “Send me $5000 or your Toy selling website will be offline over the Christmas holidays”. The Zombie Master can also use these infected computers to send spam while the zombie master remains anonymous and the blame goes to the infected computers. To Generate Money These types of infections often masquerade as free spyware or virus removal tools (known as rogueware). Once ran, these fake applications will “scan” your computer and say it found has someviruses (even if there arent any) and in order to remove them, you must pay for the full version of the application. A good example of such a infection is called Myzor.fk whichwe have written about in the past DIAGRAM