Translate

Thursday, March 7, 2013

Where did this whole issue with Malware begin?

Some of you that have read my blog and like it may say "Alright, I'm hooked. But when did this all start?"

Well, I have the answer for you.

The first piece of malware in my opinion was the Elk Cloner virus. This virus was written in 1982 by a 15 year old high school student named Rich Skrenta. The virus was originally written as a joke, created and put onto a game on a floppy disk. The virus attached itself to Apple II operating systems using a technique now known as a boot sector virus. It was attached to a game, the game was then set to play. On the 50th boot of  the game, the virus was released. So instead of playing the game, the virus would change to a blank screen that read a poem about the virus known as Elk Cloner:

"Elk Cloner: The program with a personality

It will get on all your disks
It will infiltrate your chips
Yes, it's Cloner!

It will stick to you like glue
It will modify RAM too

Send in the Cloner!"

It may be worth mentioning that today's malware is spread by the fact that 1 out of every 8 flash drives are infected with malware. These infected flash drives pass from hand to hand with no one being the wiser, echoing the way Elk Cloner spread back in 1982.

That will wrap it up for this post. Be sure and comment below if you have a question, or you just want to tell me how awesome I am.

No comments:

Post a Comment