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Virus programs

The Creeper virus was first detected on ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet, in the early 1970s.[10]Creeper was an experimental self-replicating program written by Bob Thomas at BBN Technologies in 1971.[11] Creeper used the ARPANET to infect DEC PDP-10 computers running the TENEX operating system.[12] Creeper gained access via the ARPANET and copied itself to the remote system where the message, "I'm the creeper, catch me if you can!" was displayed. The Reaper program was created to delete Creeper.[13]

A program called "Elk Cloner" was the first computer virus to appear "in the wild"—that is, outside the single computer or lab where it was created.[14] Written in 1981 by Richard Skrenta, it attached itself to the Apple DOS 3.3 operating system and spread via floppy disk.[14][15] This virus, created as a practical joke when Skrenta was still in high school, was injected in a game on a floppy disk. On its 50th use the Elk Cloner virus would be activated, infecting the computer and displaying a short poem beginning "Elk Cloner: The program with a personality."

The first PC virus in the wild was a boot sector virus dubbed (c)Brain,[16] created in 1986 by the Farooq Alvi Brothers in Lahore, Pakistan, reportedly to deter piracy of the software they had written.[17]

Before computer networks became widespread, most viruses spread on removable media, particularly floppy disks. In the early days of the personal computer, many users regularly exchanged information and programs on floppies. Some viruses spread by infecting programs stored on these disks, while others installed themselves into the disk boot sector, ensuring that they would be run when the user booted the computer from the disk, usually inadvertently. PCs of the era would attempt to boot first from a floppy if one had been left in the drive. Until floppy disks fell out of use, this was the most successful infection strategy and boot sector viruses were the most common in the wild for many years.[1]

Traditional computer viruses emerged in the 1980s, driven by the spread of personal computers and the resultant increase in BBS, modem use, and software sharing. Bulletin board-driven software sharing contributed directly to the spread of Trojan horse programs, and viruses were written to infect popularly traded software. Shareware and bootleg software were equally common vectors for viruses on BBS's.
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Creeper (program)

Creeper was an experimental self-replicating program written by Bob Thomas at BBN[1] in 1971. It was designed not to damage but to demonstrate a mobile application.[2] It is generally accepted to be the first computer worm,[3] although the notion of a "computer virus" did not exist in the 1970s.[2] Creeper infected DEC PDP-10 computers running the TENEX operating system.

Virus

Creeper gained access via the ARPANET and copied itself to the remote system where the message, "I'm the creeper, catch me if you can!" was displayed. The Creeper would start to print a file, but then stop, find another Tenex system, open a connection, pick itself up and transfer to the other machine (along with its external state, files, etc.), and then start running on the new machine, displaying the message. The program rarely if ever actually replicated itself; rather, it jumped from one system to another, attempting to remove itself from previous systems as it propagated forward. Thus, Creeper didn't install multiple instances of itself on several targets, it just moseyed around a network.

Elk Cloner:

Elk Cloner is one of the first known microcomputer viruses that spread "in the wild," i.e., outside the computer system or lab in which it was written.[1][2][3][4] It was written around 1982 by a 15-year-old high school student named Rich Skrenta for Apple II systems.

Infection and symptoms

Elk Cloner spread by infecting the Apple II operating system using a technique now known as a "boot sector" virus. If a computer booted from an infected floppy disk, a copy of the virus was placed in the computer's memory. When an uninfected disk was inserted into the computer, Elk Cloner would be copied to the disk, allowing it to spread from disk to disk.[5]

An infected computer would display a short poem on every 50th boot:

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!

Elk Cloner did not cause deliberate harm, but Apple DOS disks without a standard image had their reserved tracks overwritten.[6]

Morris worm:

The Morris worm or Internet worm of November 2, 1988 was one of the first computer worms distributed via the Internet. It is considered the first worm and was certainly the first to gain significant mainstream media attention. It also resulted in the first conviction in the US under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.[1] It was written by a student at Cornell University, Robert Tappan Morris (, son of , Anm.: siehe auch MTN-Meldung ), and launched on November 2, 1988 from MIT.

Architecture of the worm

Disk containing the source code for the Morris Worm held at the Boston Museum of Science.

According to its creator, the Morris worm was not written to cause damage, but to gauge the size of the Internet. However, the worm was released from MIT to disguise the fact that the worm originally came from Cornell. Additionally, the Morris worm worked by exploiting known vulnerabilities in Unix sendmail, finger, and rsh/rexec, as well as weak passwords. Due to reliance on rsh (normally disabled on untrusted networks) it should not succeed with the recent properly configured system.

A supposedly unintended consequence of the code, however, caused it to be more damaging: a computer could be infected multiple times and each additional process would slow the machine down, eventually to the point of being unusable. This would have the same effect as a fork bomb and crash the computer. The main body of the worm could only infect DEC VAX machines running 4BSD, and Sun-3 systems. A portable C "grappling hook" component of the worm was used to pull over (download) the main body, and the grappling hook could run on other systems, loading them down and making them peripheral victims.
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Mit der heutigen Definition von Viren wäre der Creeper-Virus heutzutage kein Virus, sondern ein Wurm, da er keine Dateien infiziert, sondern sich nur selbst im Netzwerk fortpflanzt.