40th Anniversary of the Computer Virus 60
Orome1 writes "This year marks the 40th anniversary of Creeper, the world's first computer virus. From Creeper to Stuxnet, the last four decades saw the number of malware instances boom from 1,300 in 1990, to 50,000 in 2000, to over 200 million in 2010. Besides sheer quantity, viruses, which were originally used as academic proofs of concept, quickly turned into geek pranks, then evolved into cybercriminal tools. By 2005, the virus scene had been monetized, and virtually all viruses were developed with the sole purpose of making money via more or less complex business models."
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Never occurred to me that Minecraft's creepers (viz. a kind of exploding NPC, a Minecrafter's worst enemy) may be a actually be named after an early computer virus... or maybe they are just called that because they sort of creep up on you, and then... BOOM.
Celebration (Score:1)
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I mean when you actually watch some of these people, blinding pounding the next [sic]
I know most users are dolts, but I thought that was an old wives tale!
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100,000 unique pieces of Malware identified... (Score:3)
each and every day.
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My favorite virus of all time was the Ping Pong virus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping-Pong_virus). I have an infected 5 1/4" floppy around here somewhere that I kept just for the fun of it. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't really work to well on modern computers.....but I could be wrong......
Re:No problem for me. (Score:5, Funny)
You also apparently have an MS wireless keyboard!
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You forgot the archaic, but still ubiquitous, "NO CARRIER" at the end.
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So that's what happens when James Joyce posses a troll. Who new?
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Damn it, I hate when a troll proof reads better than I do; posses=possesses
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Don't be homonymphobic.
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Also, new=knew
Yes, thank you. I can't believe I missed that one too.
Core War (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm too young (alive in 1971, but only a kid) to remember Creeper, but I remember Core War in the early 1980s, a game inspired by Creeper and Reaper. The programs written for Core War were the conceptual ancestors of the modern virus, competing in Darwinian fashion to destroy each other and take over the system's core memory. Different coding strategies were involved, such as writing a program to be self-repairing vs. keeping it simple and small enough to evade detection vs. brute force offense and defense be damned, etc. All perfectly harmless... but I can't help wondering how many 1980s virus coders learned some of their craft from Core War.
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You never really ran ME did you? It was 98. And all those Victoria's Secret catalogues you claim to have - they're really Macy's catalogues aren't they?
Something wonderful has happened (Score:3, Interesting)
Your AMIGA is alive !!!
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Sounds about right from memory, although actually it was about 20,000 less than that. McAfee played a marketing fluff game by counting 20,000 viruses generated by a one simple generator as different viruses. Everyone else had to follow suit.
Virus Control Improvements (Score:5, Interesting)
In 2006 or so I went to a conference in Redmond (WinHEC, I believe) where one of Microsoft's security team managers presented and overview of the virus threat to the desktop market. One of the things Microsoft had recently learned is that the majority of exploits were coming from hackers that had reverse engineered Windows patches to identify where Microsoft was correcting buffer overflow issues. Based on that knowledge, hackers knew un-patched versions of Windows could be exploited.
The strategy at MSFT became somewhat simple at that point: minimize the time between a security update's release and its application on 100% of networked computers. The presenter could show that MSFT had brought this average time down from months to weeks back then. Its clear to me that Microsoft has continued to make gains in this space over the years.
Lastly, the presenter showed that the exact same process applied to Linux. Few hackers find vulnerabilities to poring through an entire operating system's code base. They reverse-engineer patches and then hunt for un-patched systems. Microsoft claimed to be ahead of Linux in their ability to mass-apply security patches and he showed results that a Linux honeypot would be compromised slightly quicker that Windows, although not significantly so. I found the author credible in his data but recognize that he had an agenda with his presentation.
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However i still don't see a massive amount of threats in linux (besides its open source nature) like you can see every month in microsoft reports. If you summ up all virus that has been present in linux over its entire history it doesn't compare with a single year of MS, and i repeat BESIDES ITS OPEN SOURCE NATURE.
pd.: sorry for my awfull eng.
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so according to you its because the users are stupid that windows is over run with virus and malware problems and osx and linux are largely left alone. Even with android it takes a trojan from an unofficial market place on a rooted phone to get infected and there is no replication.
I'm just not buying that,there are stupid users on every platform but they are not getting hit. You don't need to be great with computers to use Linux and there are a good number of people that are not good with computers using Li
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interesting link but there is the problem that an image file is shown as an image file of the image on the desktop or even in the home directory certainly in the case of 10.04 . Even in the article its mentioned xubuntu isn't vulnerable to this. It's also from 3 years ago and was using 8.10 we are now in 2011 and ubuntu has had 9.04, 9.10, 10.04. 10,10 and in a few weeks 11.04 will be released.
ok lets say the truth is that its still possible to infect a Desktop or OSX or Linux system. it is still pretty mi
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Intelligent viruses (virii) (Score:1)
I was impressed when reading TFA (Yep, I actually read it for a change) to find out how advanced the original 'Creeper' virus was. It had artificial intelligence and everything - read again... "...and starts over, thereby hoping from system to system". It only 'hoped' from one system to the next - that's cool.
What a pointless piece...! (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a typical puff piece by an ignorant reporter. Why didn't they ask a real virus researcher about some of the most influential viruses? Where is there no comment about BRAIN, the first international-spread virus which invented the boot-sector infection path? Why no mention of the amazing prevalence of FORM, which constituted about 1/3 of all infections in the world at its height? Why is there nothing about CONCEPT, the Microsoft-written virus which ushered in the era of high-level language macro viruses?
Why are the only viruses mentioned ones which there has been some public fuss about? I know - because the author knows nothing about this arcane technical subject, but hasn't let that get in the way of writing 500 words....
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I agree - where's Robert Tappan Morris's Internet worm?
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Right... I don't see how anyone pretending to know anything about the history of the computer virus phenomenon could fail to mention the Pakistani Brain Virus.
What Stuxnet targets is pretty well known -- the controllers for those uranium isotope separating centrifuges. It changes the speed to physically damage them. The reporter didn't even attempt to pretend that he'd done his homework.
Lets start with a better list (Score:3)
An article about the history of computer viruses that mentions Microsoft, Windows or IIS only 7 times? Lets start with a better list (thank you Wikipedia):
* Michelangelo: The virus was designed to infect DOS systems
* Melissa: It can spread on word processors Microsoft Word 97 and Word 2000 and also Microsoft Excel 97, 2000 and 2003. It can mass-mail itself from e-mail client Microsoft Outlook 97 or Outlook 98.
* I LOVE YOU: is a computer worm that successfully attacked tens of millions of Windows computers in 2000
* Code Red: 359,000 Microsoft's IIS web server.
* Sasser: running [on] vulnerable versions of the Microsoft operating systems Windows XP and Windows 2000
* Zotob: [runs on] Microsoft operating systems like Windows 2000,
* Storm botnet: The botnet, or zombie network, comprises computers running Microsoft Windows as their operating system, with the Storm worm at one point accounting for 8% of all malware on Microsoft Windows computers.
* Koobface: is designed to infect Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X, but also works on Linux (in a limited fashion)
* Conficker: targeting the Microsoft Windows operating system, with more than seven million government, business and home computers in over 200 countries now under its control.
* Stuxnet: is a Windows computer worm discovered in July 2010 that targets industrial software and equipment. Iran 62,867; Indonesia 13,336; India 6,552; United States 2,913;Australia 2,436;United Kingdom 1,038;Malaysia 1,013;Pakistan 993, all Windows.
What’s next? Are you kidding me? More Windows infected machines, more spam and more attacks on governments and industry that are stupid enough to pay for this system.
...Like a fine wine... (Score:1)
Semi-related topic (Score:3)
The Cuckoo's Egg is a great book on hacker hunting.
http://www.amazon.com/Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Computer-Espionage/dp/1416507787/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1300160625&sr=1-1 [amazon.com]
read TFA! :( (Score:2)
This is sad. Slasdotters are so used to not reading TFA that they sometimes miss interesting stories like this one. It's a light and amusing article. Read it!
My Ubuntu wished the computer virus a happy birthd (Score:1)