The Computer Virus Turns 25 in July 194
bl8n8r writes "In July of 1982, an infected Apple II propogated the first computer virus onto a 5-1/4" floppy. The virus, which did little more than annoy the user, Elk Cloner, was authored in Pittsburgh by a 15-year-old high school student, Rich Skrenta. The virus replicated by monitoring floppy disk activity and writing itself to the floppy when it was accessed. Skrenta describes the virus as "It was a practical joke combined with a hack. A wonderful hack." Remember, he was a 9th grader when he did this."
Imagine his wealth... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Imagine his wealth... (Score:5, Funny)
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Sort of like to old story about "Windows is not done until 1-2-3- will not run"?
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Sort of like to old story about "Windows is not done until 1-2-3- will not run"?
The "old story" is "DOS ain't done 'til Lotus won't run" (people using "Windows" in the phrase are just betraying their youth and the fact they're working with hearsay). Further, the very idea of an OS vendor sabotaging probably the single most important application on their platform - and hence about the only reason many of their customers were their customers in the first place - is so ludicrous that no sane person would ev
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Prior art. NOT first. (Score:2)
His patent would have been challenged due to prior art. (One I know about is John Walker's "Pervading Animal" in 1975, although there are claims of earlier stuff.)
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Script kiddie age? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Wow, maybe you consider that the ultimate laudation. but it is really something embarrassing to be bragging about. Clearly you have absolutely no imagination if you can't figure out how to write a virus, it is one of the more simple programs you could write. Look at the fact early viruses were often detected by the number of BYTES they addes to an exe or com file.
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I think I made it reasonably clear that I have no interest in writing a virus, and thus, have not spent any time whatsoever trying to figure out how to do it. Why would I want to write a virus?
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There is something of a difference between understanding how a virus works, and taking the time to figure out how to implement one effectively. It's the latter that I'm uninterested in pursuing...
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I used to do it for fun, because it gets interesting when you can infect multiple file types, .com, .sys, .exe, and you can play around with self-modification.
I haven't seen those kinds of file-infectors for a long time - mainly because the modern executable format doesn't support this kind of stuff as well. If you write a virus in that way, it might not be able to handle Protected-mode dos applications (although I'm not willing to test this for obvious reasons.) It's not a problem with Windows .EXE files, but most modern virus scanners know that trick and report a new unknown virus.
I've also haven't seen Boot-sector viruses either - the last one I had was t
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It's people like you that get jobs in major corporations and end up becoming security advisors.
Why, because I'm not interested in writing viruses? There are plenty of other CS topics one can study without learning how to write a virus.
But if they explain how they were well into programming before any formal education
I started programming long before I had any formal programming education. I've just always been more interested in game and au
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"What are your thoughts on the mythical man month?"
and
"Outside of work and school what are some interesting projects you have worked on?"
I know a lot great programmers without formal education, but I also know several excellent people w
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I'm not a big fan of questions that require one to have read a particular book or to have knowledge of something that is not in their scope of expertise. The "Mythical Man Month" is a project management concept. Its not up to your programmers to decide, or understand how the project is managed, thats part of the standard division of labor (at least anyplace I have worked, perhaps you work in very different environments).
That said, I could discuss that que
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Yes, but it's a concept from a book that was written specifically about software development projects.
What's more, even a "code jockey" is going to be expected to give reasonable estimates of how much time it will take his team to complete a particular task. That's kind of what the MMM is all about.
So, thanks for playing, but if you can't be bothered to read one of the oldest and most respected books about your chosen career then I think it's
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Oh yea and if you look at the very first sentence in this wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] they call it a book on software project management, which is, you know, what it is.
So lets say you have a guy who knows C++ inside and out (and that is what you are developing in) he is an excellent architect who comes up with fantastic solutions to problems every day. He i
Re:Pretty sad! (Score:5, Funny)
CS Graduates don't goto school. They instantiate a CSStudent (using a StudentFactory class). CSStudent implemnents a functor Notify callback as part of the abstract Student interface. Using the Observer pattern, they call the Attach method of the ConcreteSchool class which implements the School Interface. Then the ConcreteSchool class calls Notify and passes a Notification object containing a ConcreteClass object which the Student stores in a Dictionary class, Knowledge. In the examination Use Case, the Notify is called with a ExamNotification object containing a List of ExamQuestion objects. CSStudent intantiates an Iterator which iterates though the list and uses the Dictionary object's Lookup method to answer each question, calling before calling ExamNotification's Answer method.
After reception of a Graduation, ExamFailure or DrugsBust notification, the CSStudent destructor is called. This in turn calls the Knowledge destructor and the Knowledge Dictionary is deleted.
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You're a moron, and I think you know it. Otherwise you wouldn't have posted as an AC. I hope you're not working on anything important. For your employer's sake.
Answering my own question, sort of (Score:5, Informative)
CIH, by Chen Ing Hau, who "attended a university" at the time of release ~1998.
Melissa virus, by David L. Smith, age 31 in 1999
ILOVEYOU, by university student for thesis, 2000
Code Red, author unknown?
SQL Slammer, 2003, by a 21-22 year old
Blaster, 2003, variant by an 18 year old
Sobig, possibly by 30 year old Ruslan Ibragimov?
Bagle, author unknown?
MyDoom, unknown
Sasser, by 17 year old
Not much to go on.
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VIRUS WARNING:
Attention: Computer Labs Inc., makers of Virucide antivirus software have identified a highly dangerous new Trojan worm, MONKEYPOO. It will usually appear in an e-mail with the subject, "Congratulations.You have won!" it will then prompt you to click a link to collect your cash prize. It can also freely spread across networks.
Monkeypoo will read your address book, and mail a copy of itself to every address it finds, and it will look like you sent it. It will then in
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In fact, my pc clock was a couple days off and I got hit AFTER seeing it on the news, IIRC...
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Found it.
Re:Answering my own question, sort of (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Script kiddie age? (Score:4, Insightful)
What this kid did was go into the the Apple internals and figure out how to do something himself. In hindsight it was not such a great feat, but is was a feat that was at least somewhat novel.
OTOH, kids have nothing but time on their hands and if the parents and schools don't keep them busy, then they find other ways to stay busy. The more cleaver one can produce some real havoc. What impresses me is the high school kid that does something creative and interesting with his or her free time, instead of being randomly malicious. The really good ones will go out and start applying their skills to the betterment of humanity, but really any bright kid that chooses a path that is not gratuitously destructive is a win in my opinion.
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Don't forget the Lehigh Virus (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Don't forget the Lehigh Virus (Score:4, Interesting)
Still, sounds like something very harmless. You should see Amiga-related (not AmigaOS related as much of the population used Amiga as game console) viruses, like Saddam. I think orginal Saddam could be proud this piece of horrible software.
Then, with release of AmigaOS 2.04, we had new kind of viruses. They would spread like... er... viruses? They patched all systems calls dealing with resources loading and all your fonts, device drivers, libraries, executables was infected. I still remember Happy New Year 1996 -- it took me two days with no sleep to clean my disk. Anti-virus software that could deal with it was designed by someone who hated people. First, you passed what it should scan. Then, when process started, at every instance of virus it would start FROM THE TOP. And it would say "Oh, you have an virus. It was deleted. Continue?" You HAD to click it to start again. My Libs: directory had over 6500 shared libraries. All infected.
(Yes, I realize it was done to prevent from recursive infection. This should not be the case since all system vectors was checked all the time by the very same program.)
I think this guy was hired to do 'Allow or Cancel' component. :-)
Has this been done before? (Score:4, Funny)
Not a virus, just a prank but still
Re:Has this been done before? (Score:5, Funny)
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My personal preference is take the screen shot, flip it, then set that as the background. WinXP makes things easy because you can just right click and uncheck "show icons". I do it once or twice a year at work. Doesn't work so well anymore now that all PCs will lock themselves after 10 minutes of inactivity.
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The truly evil among us keep *SOME* of the icons on the desktop, and hide the rest away in another folder. Thus, some of the icons work, while the rest are just images. Truly infuriating!
One of the nice
Re:Has this been done before? (Score:5, Funny)
The guy was one of the types that always reminded you of his certifications. yet it took us telling him it was a screensaver to stop him from tearing apart his PC.
It was funnier than hell, he stopped chasing us with sharp objects about 4 days later.
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Re:Has this been done before? (Score:4, Informative)
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It took me a few reboots to think "wait a minute, the BSOD screensaver BSODs? Goddamnit"...
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Re:Has this been done before? (Score:4, Funny)
I miss that job!
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The good times (Score:2)
Ah, the joy of being young and destructive. Reminds me of something I did when I was younger...
I was in my middle school computer lab, bored and I guess pissed off about something. Anyway, the lab machines were these Mac SE/30's, old even for the time. On the hard drive there were eight folders. So in a bid to freak out the next person to use the computer, I placed all of these into one folder. Then I made eight new folders, and renamed them with the names of the eight original folders. Then I placed
The reason why Macs are so much more secure... (Score:5, Funny)
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Happy birthday! (Score:5, Funny)
Stealing thumder from the Mac users (Score:3, Funny)
Maya Angelou eat your heart out! (Score:2, Interesting)
Your computer is now stoned! (Score:4, Interesting)
McAfee (Score:2, Insightful)
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Probably was McAfee. Which was a fantastic scanner at the time. Oh how things have changed since then. Sad to see both McAfee and Norton/Symantec turn into useless piles of garbage considering what they once were...
MCafee was never fantastic, it was Virex which was fantastic and they acquired it and raped it just like their Symantec buddies did to Peter Norton ages code of Norton Utilities.
About the rate of plain vandalism? I tried the latest Virex (Mcafee) trial on a system with 4 PPC970MP cores and 2,5 GB of RAM: System became barely usable. I remember my brothers PowerBook Duo 270c (68030 with 24mb ram) working happily with the original Virex running 24/7.
The point is: Both companies never did anything right. They
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Anyone remember that one? It was such a pain in the ass at the time, but it didn't go around and delete files, etc. And we got it from pirating program after program. Solution? Install a pirated version of the first anti-virus programs. I'm so old that I can't remember what exactly it was... It might actually have been Norton.
It was most likely McAfee (back when it was shareware freely distributed via the BBS community).
I don't believe Norton got into the anti-virus market until much later (though at that time every geek worthy of the name *did* have a copy of Norton Utilities, most likely pirated).
I *liked* that virus. I was studying computers at the local community college, and printed out the assembly code for "stoned" to study. The top programmer at the electronics company I worked for spotted me reading the code, sat dow
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Not the oldest. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not claiming mine was the oldest because I'm sure someone did something similar on the old heavy iron even earlier than my little "payload" as we called then it.
Really Not the oldest. (Score:3, Interesting)
My understanding was that the first computer viruses were penned at Bell Labs in a series of experiments called the "Core Wars". The goal was to eliminate as many enemy tasks as possible while keeping your tasks running. Byte has an article on the subject in the 1980's. Of course, at the time, disk media were in limited supply. This made spreading away from the test mainframe next to impossible.
Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War [wikipedia.org]
Really Really Not the oldest. (Score:5, Funny)
Really Really Really Not the oldest. (Score:2)
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1988 Morris internet worm (Score:5, Interesting)
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Actually the story is a bit more interesting than this. The author did think about this, and even programmed the worm to ask a target system whether it was already infected, and if it was then it would decline to infect it again.
The flaw came in a deliberate modification of this strategy. Following this idea completely would make the worm easy to defeat, since you could just run a program that listened for the query and answered "yes" to kee
Um no. it wasn't (Score:4, Informative)
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God, you must be old if you can recall a day when Apple had games...
(j/k, sorta. Quake3 on mac w/Logitec mouse at home, pc at work)
Bullshit! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bullshit! (Score:5, Funny)
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Oh Frak (Score:2)
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Cheers!
Maybe not a virus.... (Score:2, Interesting)
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In college... (Score:2)
I wonder if all my disks have this virus... (Score:2)
The first virus? I do not think so. (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.viruslist.com/en/viruses/encyclopedia?
Furthermore http://www.viruslist.com/en/viruses/encyclopedia?
The Computer Virus Turns 25 in July (Score:2)
still infecting...in emulators (Score:4, Informative)
Maybe I'll keep it around as a living pet in my emulator
This Was Not the First Virus (Score:4, Interesting)
The Reaper was written to replicate and find Creeper and delete it. Then came Rabbit in 1974 which caused systems to crash because it screwed system performance due to replicating so fast (wonder why it was called Rabbit.....)
Happy Birthday to Computer Viruses! (Score:2, Funny)
Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday to viruses,
Hap...
Fatal Error: HappyBirthday.exe has been corrupted. Please contact your system administrator.
[OK]
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Missing out on an old joke (Score:2)
Doesn't this sound an awful lot like the OP to you? It gets posted (usually in a modified form) as a rather amusing troll in most Mac-related discussions here nowadays. The "SWITCHEUR" troll is pretty funny too.
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It could not cope with the modern times, it is true but it doesn't make it "suck". What sucks is the people switching to Mac OS X/Apple and trying to convert it to some nerd OS they were used to. Glad that Apple at
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Try SGI or Amiga. Macs were likely used in simple things, but I doubt in any serious capacity.
FreeBSD and Mach are Unix based. [levenez.com] So is OSX.
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Avid video suites? All Mac based until a few years ago, and many of the original installations are still operational in production facilities around the world.
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SGI were serious rendering farms and 3d design workhorses.
At the end, all went to AVID million dollar monster which was entirely built on Macintosh platform. In fact lots of AVIDs must still be running MacOS since you don't run and update OS on such systems.
AVID didn't even have non Mac product until they had some fight with Apple.
OS X is NeXT with inventions added from MacOS, having a layer of FreeBSD or having sam
Re:When did we start talking about Macs? (Score:2)
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We would be talking about Apple DOS 3.3 here, which had been around for two years, and had already gotten a bugfix. (Then again, finding out what version you actually had was difficult, as they weren't versioned differently, and they dropped in place of one another - one could actually put the bugfixed 3.3 on a non-bugfixed System Master, and the HELLO code would
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In addition, the Commodore PET and VIC-20 used the 6502, and the 64 and 128 used the 6510 (a modified 6502.)
Also, the Atari 2600, 5200, 400, and 800 used either a modified 6502 (for the 2600) or a 6502 (for the others.)
Windows the first virus? Don't think so... (Score:2)