In recent years, computers became important machine to humans. The dawn of information technology and Internet only intensified the importance of computers to our lives. With the many uses of computers, from store checkout counters to military base camps, computer security became a prime issue that requires attention. The existence of different computer infections and viruses didn't help; if any, the need for computer protection just increased in the recent years.
Computer viruses fast became a major headache for many computer owners all over the world. These cyber infections even made the headlines of international news because of the havoc they managed to create. A mere report on a newly discovered virus engenders a surge of terror to the cyber community, causing anti-virus softwares to sell like hotcakes. The large market for different anti-virus softwares just proves how potentially dangerous and fearsome these cyber infections have become.
Like the realm of computer and Internet, viruses also have its own history. As many people might have noticed, viruses have come a long way already. Almost at par with the improvements and developments of computer and various computer softwares, cyber infections also underwent many evolutions through the years. From simple and virtually harmless self-replicating applications, they have progressed into becoming powerful and massively destructive ones. Although the origins of viruses have already been identified, there is still no clear ending visible in the near future when continuous virus creation and spread would completely cease.
Biological viruses attack animals and humans with weak immune defenses. Similarly, cyber viruses commonly occur only to computers that don't have effective anti-virus softwares and on bug-infested applications. The term "bug" was first used by Rear Admiral Grace Murray in 1945 when she discovered a moth stuck inside their Navy computer and was since used to allude to problems and flaws of electrical devices. "Debugging" was also coined by Murray Hopper to describe the actions done to sort out and correct computer glitches.
The concept of self-replicating applications occurred to John von Neumann, a Hungarian scientist and mathematician who is also the pioneer of digital computers. In 1949, von Neumann came up with the theory of these self-reproducing programs that also became the foundation for computers that can hold information or data in their so-called memory. These self-reproducing programs would be the forerunners of cyber viruses as the world knows it today.
Although the concept already exists mid 20th century, the first known computer viruses didn't take off until late in the century. During the 1960s, programmers developed a computer game known as "Core Wars". This game was programmed to simulate the computer environment and replicates itself every time it is run. Core Wars includes a set of instructions called "Redstone Code" which constructs programs that fight each other. Basically, the game objective is for a single program to survive by attacking other programs and continuously replicating itself. The same programmers who built this first known virus also developed the first anti-virus, the Reeper, which eliminates the copies made by the Core Wars program.
Twenty years later and "Elk Cloner" was developed by high school student, Rich Skrenta in 1982. The Elk Cloner was the very first known computer virus that occurred outside the computer it was originally made. The virus appends itself on Apple DOS 3.3 OS and is disseminated through floppy drives. The virus was incorporated in a game and initializes when the game is run for its 50th time, in which the user's computer screen would become blank and would start reading a poem. It was almost amusing to know that the Elk Cloner was made by Skrenta only as a prank.
A couple of years following Elk Cloner came (c)Brain, a virus that attacks the boot sector. It was developed by Pakistani-based programmers, Amjad Farooq and Basit Alvi. The virus was developed, according to the brothers, to dissuade other people from pirating the softwares they developed. The (c)Brain affects the boot sector of a storage media with DOS File Allocation Table (FAT) formatting. What it does is relocate a storage media's boot sector and tagged as bad. That boot sector then, is replaced by (c)Brain and made the floppy drives perform sluggishly and kept a total memory of seven kilobytes unavailable for usage to DOS.
The first known trojan horse was also called the "arf arf" programs. The forerunners of the present-day trojans is an application that claims that it is capable of making graphics possible on TTL monitors. Once the application is run, it displays a taunting message that says, "Gotcha. Arf, arf." and at the same time erases the hard drive.
In contrast with biological viruses, cyber viruses don't evolve on their own. They are not produced naturally, but are man-made. Computer viruses are deliberately made by computer programmers for different reasons. As of the present, the concept of digital virus evolution of is thankfully not yet possible.
It is often a wonder to many people (especially to those of pure heart) why anyone would want to create something destructive to mess with a perfectly functioning machine. During their early days, viruses and trojans are created as prank or jokes. In contrary to their current-day successors, cyber viruses don't intend for a computer's system to crash or break down. There are viruses that are currently available in the market that is written for prank purposes. One example of virus pranks is the PARASCAN which stands for "paranoid scanner". This program acts as though it searches an entire computer's system for viruses that are surprisingly not present at the CARO index.
There are also the so-called benign viruses which are created with the intention to eradicate other harmful viruses and improve an application or a computer system's performance. These seemingly good viruses though have the potential to become "evil" viruses once they become tools for harmful viruses to their dirty work. When this happens, the supposedly "good" virus now functions as a bad one, deleting important files and slow down computer performance.
But even though there are actual prank and benign viruses, they only comprise a small percentage of the whole virus population, meaning there are still more harmful viruses out there that aims to destroy computer systems and applications. Most viruses are created to gain profit by identity theft, disseminate political (or impolitic) messages, attack products by other companies, and for cryptoviral extortion. With so many viruses nowadays, a good anti-virus software is a definite must-have.
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