The common story is that two brothers from Pakistan analyzed the boot sector of a floppy disk and developed a method of infecting it with a virus dubbed “Brain” (the origin is generally accepted but not absolutely). Because it spread widely on the popular MS-DOS PC system this is typically…
The first computer worm, dubbed the “Morris worm” after it’s creator Robert Morris Jr., appeared in the winter of 1988. It was not written to cause damage, but to spread. Morris originally had benign reasons for creating it, claiming it was to gauge the size of the internet. A Cornell…
In 1982, 15 year old student Richard Skrenta wrote the first known computer virus in the wild. Also known as the Apple II virus, Elk Cloner spread by infecting Apple II systems via infected floppy disks. Although not causing any deliberate harm, it was extremely annoying. On every 50th boot,…