Naked Science Forum
Non Life Sciences => Geek Speak => Topic started by: paul.fr on 31/01/2008 01:19:39
-
I know the early viruses were harmless, and just pranks or things to annoy the writers friend. For instance they would make your pc play music, something horrid, on start up. But when did they first become 'nasty'?
-
They've become more prevalent with the increased use of the internet. Prior to that, they had to be propagated via disk & I don't remember any really nasty ones being spread that way. Although it depends what you call nasty.
I remember 1 called Autumn Leaves that made all the characters on the screen fall to the bottom. It didn't do any lasting damage, but it was bloody annoying.
-
Most of the early viruses were nasty by accident (this is also still often the case) - where it was bad design that caused the machine to fail rather than the intent of the virus righter.
Again, what do you mean by 'virus'?
Trojans were certainly around on early multi-user systems, even before we had the Internet, but they were not normally self propagating. Technically, a trojan is not a virus; but in common parlance, many people do not make a real distinction between trojans, worms, viruses, and other malware.
-
I think the first one was called the Creeper, originally detected on the ARPANET (harbinger to the Internet). There's a wikipedia entry about this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_virus
According to the same article, something called Elk Cloner was the first one to mass-infect computers in a more widely connected network. I'd be interested in hearing more knowledgeable people's opinions on this.
-
I've heard of Creeper although I know nothing about it. I've never heard of Elk Cloner.