A Brief History of Malware and Cybercrime
12 notable developments in three decades of online threats, with notes on responses.
When it began: In 1982, a high school student named Rich Skrenta wrote Elk Cloner for Apple II computers. Hidden on a floppy disk necessary to load the operating system on the computer, it spread when users unknowingly used an infected disk to boot up. It contained an awful poem that appeared on the screen once every 50 boot-up attempts.
What it is: Viruses are software that is capable of executing an unwanted action on the victim's computer and has a mechanism for replicating itself inside other computers that come in contact with the infected machine. Viruses spread through networks to which infected computers are attached, such as e-mail systems, corporate networks or the Internet. They may also be physically transferred to another computer via portable media such as a USB drive.
Viruses started as harmless pranks—for example, a silly message that would appear on screen then disappear—and quickly graduated to criminal destruction. Today viruses can destroy data or render the computer's hard drive unusable.
Response: Anti-virus software, teaching computer users not to click on communications or software that they are not expecting to receive.
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