The father of computer viruses created his first, as an experiment, 20 years ago this week. Fred Cohen, while studying for his PhD, at USC, was the first to demonstrate how a program can infect a machine by leaving a part of itself on it.
In the paper describing his work he defined a virus as “a program that can ‘infect’ other programs by modifying them to include a … version of itself”.
Mr Cohen added his virus to a graphics program called VD that was written for a make of mini-computer called a Vax.
The virus hid inside VD and used the permissions users had to look at other parts of the Vax computer to spread around the system.
In all the tests carried out by Mr Cohen the virus managed to grab the right to reach any part of the system in less than an hour. The fastest time was five minutes.
Thus was the start and we may never see the end. Today, there are over 60,000 known viruses.
Source: BBC News
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