Today, according to The Anti-Phishing Workgroup, malware has infected one-third of the world’s computers. He defined a “virus” in a single sentence as: “A program that can infect other programs by modifying them to include a, possibly evolved, version of itself.”įrom these simple and benign beginnings, a massive and diabolical industry was born. Fred Cohen, often considered the father of what we know today as a computer virus, coined the term in his 1986 Ph.D. The term “virus” however, wasn’t introduced until the mid-eighties. Creeper gained access via the ARPANET and copied itself to remote systems where it displayed the message: “I’m the creeper, catch me if you can!” Historians often credit the “ Creeper Worm,” an experimental self-replicating program written by Bob Thomas at BBN Technologies with being the first virus. The earliest documented viruses began to appear in the early 1970s.
In the 1950s, employees at Bell Labs gave life to von Neumann’s idea when they created a game called “Core Wars.” In the game, programmers would unleash software “organisms” that competed for control of the computer. According to Scientific American, the idea of a computer virus extends back to 1949, when early computer scientist John von Neumann wrote the “ Theory and Organization of Complicated Automata,” a paper that postulates how a computer program could reproduce itself.
A brief look at the history of malware shows us that this malicious menace has been with us since the dawn of computing itself.