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rfmcdonaldYesterday was a great anniversary. Today, not so much.
Ironically enough given the Macintosh operating system's current reputation for security, the first computer virus to circulate worked on the Apple II.
Skrenta’s program wasn’t called a virus, since that moniker came later, nor did it spread widely outside his circle of friends.
Fred Cohen, a University of Southern California graduate student, gives a prescient peek at the digital future when he demonstrates a computer virus during a security seminar at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. A quarter-century later, computer viruses have become a pandemic for which there’s no inoculation.
Cohen inserted his proof-of-concept code into a Unix command, and within five minutes of launching it onto a mainframe computer, had gained control of the system. In four other demonstrations, the code managed to seize control within half an hour on average, bypassing all of the security mechanisms current at the time. It was Cohen’s academic adviser, Len Adleman (the A in RSA Security), who likened the self-replicating program to a virus, thus coining the term.
But Cohen’s malware wasn’t the first of its kind.
Others had theorized about self-replicating programs that could spread from computer to computer, and a couple of tinkerers had already successfully launched their own digital infections prior to Cohen’s presentation. But his proof-of-concept program put computer scientists on notice about the potential scourge of an intentionally malicious attack.
Ironically enough given the Macintosh operating system's current reputation for security, the first computer virus to circulate worked on the Apple II.
A 15-year-old kid from Pennsylvania was one programmer who beat Cohen to the draw. Rich Skrenta had a penchant for playing jokes on friends by spiking Apple II gaming programs with trick code that would shut down their computers or do other annoying things.
In 1982 he wrote the Elk Cloner program — a self-replicating boot-sector virus that infected Apple II computers through a floppy disk. Every 50th time the infected computer re-booted, a little ditty popped up: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!
Skrenta’s program wasn’t called a virus, since that moniker came later, nor did it spread widely outside his circle of friends.
