The PC virus celebrates its 20th year of existence following the detection of the boot sector virus, Brain, in January 1986. Software firm F-Secure reports.
Brain infected computers via floppy disk. While the virus Brain itself was relatively harmless, it set in motion a long chain of events leading up to today’s virus situation.
Boot sector viruses, now long extinct along with the floppy disk, held a relatively long reign from 1986 to 1995. Since transmission was via disk from computer to computer, infection would only reach a significant level months or even years after its release. This changed in 1995 with the development of macro viruses, which exploited vulnerabilities in the early Windows operating systems. For four years, macro viruses reigned over the IT world and propagation times shrank to around a month from the moment when the virus was found to when it was a global problem.
As email became more widespread, so followed email worms and individual worms that could reach global epidemic levels in just one day. Most notable was one of the very first emails worms, Loveletter, aka ILOVEYOU, which caused widespread havoc and financial loss in 1999 before it was brought under control.
In 2001, the transmission time window shrank from one day to one hour with the introduction of network worms (such as Blaster and Sasser), which automatically and indiscriminately infected every online computer without adequate protection. Email and network worms still today continue to cause havoc in the IT world. There are over 150,000 viruses and the number is still growing rapidly. The biggest change over the last 20 years has not been in the types of viruses or amount of malware: rather it has been in the motives of the virus writers.
“The most significant change has been the evolution of virus writing hobbyists into criminally operated gangs bent on financial gain,” says F-Secure’s Chief Research Officer Mikko Hypponen. “This trend is showing no signs of stopping.”
Hypponen adds: “There are already indications that malware authors will target laptop WLANs as the next vector for automatically spreading worms. Whatever the next step might be, it will be interesting to see what kind of viruses we will be talking about in another 20 years – computer viruses infecting household appliances, perhaps?”
About the firm
F-Secure Corporation products include anti-virus and desktop firewall with intrusion prevention, anti-spam and anti-spyware. For virus threat scenario news at the F-Secure Anti-virus Research Team weblog:
