A Short History of PC Viruses and Attacks

Ø  1945 : rear admiral grace murray hopper discovers a moth trapped between relays utilizing a navy pc. She calls it a bug, a term used since the late 19th century to refer to issues with electrical devices. Murray hopper conjointly coined the notion of debugging to explain efforts to set pc issues. 

Ø  1949 : hungarian scientist john von neumann ( 1903-1957 ) devises the theory of self-replicating programs, providing the theoretical foundation for computers that hold data with their memory. 

Ø  1960 : at&t introduces its dataphone, the very first few industrial modem.

Ø  1963 : programmers develop the american standard code for information interchange ( ascii ), a straightforward pc language that allows machines
created by completely different manufacturers to exchange information. 

Ø  1964 : at&t begins monitoring telephone calls attempt to'>to attempt to discover the identities of phone freaks, or phreakers, who use blue boxes as tone generators to build free messages or calls. The groups surveillance chief tells newsweek magazine in 1975 that the corporate monitored 33 million toll calls to look for phreakers. At&t scores 200 convictions from the time the investigation ends in 1970.

Ø  1969 : programmers at at&ts bell laboratories develop the unix  operating system, the very first few multi-tasking operating system. 

Ø  1969 : the advanced research comes agency launches arpanet, an early network used by government research teams and universities, and the forerunner on your internet. 

Ø  1972 : john draper, soon as being referred to actually as captain crunch, discovers that the plastic whistle utilizing a box of breakfast cereal reproduces a 2600-hertz tone. With a blue box, the whistle unlocks at&ts phone network, allowing free calls and manipulation on your network. Among different phreakers on your nineteen seventies is famous future hacker kevin  mitnick. 

Ø  1972 : future apple pc co-founder steve wozniak builds his own blue box. Wozniak sells the device to fellow university of california-berkeley students. 

Ø  1974 : telenet, a industrial version of arpanet, debuts. 

Ø  1979 : engineers at xerox palo alto research center discover the pc worm, a quick program that scours a network for idle processors. Designed to produce additional efficient pc use, the worm will be the ancestor of modern worms -- destructive pc viruses that alter or erase information on computers, typically leaving files irretrievably corrupted. 

Ø  1983 : the fbi busts the 414s, a gaggle of young hackers who break into many u. S. Government networks, in a few cases using only an apple ii+ pc as well as a modem. 

Ø  1983 : university of southern california doctoral candidate fred cohen coins the term pc virus to explain a pc program that will affect different pc programs by modifying them in this sort of method as to embrace a ( possibly evolved ) copy of itself. Anti-virus makers later capitalize on cohens research on virus defense techniques. 

Ø  1984 : in her novel, neuromancer, author william gibson popularizes the notion of cyberspace, a little bit of advice he designed to describe the network of computers through that characters in her futuristic novels travel. 

Ø  1986 : one of the many 1st pc viruses ever created, the brain, is released by programmers in pakistan. 

Ø  1988 : twenty-three-year-old programmer robert morris unleashes a worm that invades arpanet computers. The small program disables roughly 6, 000 computers inside the network by flooding their memory banks with copies of itself. Morris confesses to making the worm away from boredom. He's fined $10, 000 and sentenced to 3 years probation.

Ø  1991 : programmer philip zimmerman releases pretty sensible privacy ( pgp ), a free, powerful data-encryption tool. The u. S. Government begins a three-year criminal investigation on zimmerman, alleging he broke u. S. Encryption laws once his program spread rapidly along the globe. The government later drops the charges. 

Ø  1991 : symantec releases the norton anti-virus software. 

Ø  1994 : inexperienced e-mail users dutifully forward an e-mail warning folks to not open any message in the phrase sensible times within the whole subject line. The missive, that warns associated with a virus with the facility to erase a recipients onerous drive, demonstrates the self-replicating power of e-mail virus hoaxes that proceed to circulate in numerous forms these days.

Ø  1995 : microsoft corp. Releases windows 95. Anti-virus corporations worry that the operating system will certainly be resistant to viruses. Later within the whole year, but, evolved macro viruses seem which can be found able to corrupt the new windows operating system. 

Ø  1998 : intruders infiltrate and take management of more often 500 military, government and private sector pc systems. The incidents -- dubbed solar sunrise once the well-known vulnerabilities in computers run inside the sun solaris operating system -- were thought to possess originated from operatives in iraq. Investigators later learn that 2 california teenagers were behind the attacks. The experience provides the defense department its initial style of what hostile adversaries with bigger skills and resources might possibly be able to try and do to the nations command and management center, significantly if utilized in tandem with physical attacks. 

Ø  1999 : the infamous melissa virus infects a large number of computers with alarming speed, inflicting an estimated $80 million in harm and prompting record sales of anti-virus merchandise. The virus starts a program that sends copies of itself to

the very first 50 names listed within the whole recipients outlook e-mail address book. It too infects microsoft word documents inside the users onerous drive, and mails them out through outlook to a similar 50 recipients.

Ø  Might 2000 : the i like you virus infects legion computers virtually overnight, employing a technique similar onto the melissa virus. The virus also sends passwords and usernames stored on infected computers returning to the viruss author. Authorities trace the virus to your young filipino pc student, other then he goes free as a result of the philippines has no laws against hacking and spreading pc viruses. This spurs the creation on your european unions world cybercrime treaty. 

Ø  2000 : yahoo, ebay, amazon, datek and dozens of different high-profile websites are knocked offline for up to many hours indulging in series of so-called distributed denial-of-service attacks. Investigators later find that the ddos attacks -- during which a target system is disabled by a flood of traffic from countless computers simultaneously -- were orchestrated as soon as the hackers co-opted powerful computers along at the university of california-santa barbara. 

Ø  2001 : the anna kournikova virus, promising digital pictures of the young tennis star, mails itself to each person listed within the whole victims microsoft outlook address book. This relatively benign virus frightens pc security analysts, who believe finally it was written using a software toolkit that allows even the foremost inexperienced programmer to build a pc virus. 

Ø  July 2001 : the code red worm infects tens of a large number of systems running microsoft windows nt and windows 2000 server software, inflicting an estimated $2 billion in damages. The worm is programmed to work with the power of all infected machines against the white house web web site at a predetermined date. Enduring an ad hoc partnership with virus hunters and technology corporations, the white house deciphers the viruss code and blocks traffic clearly as the worm begins its attack. 

Ø  2001 : debuting simply days once the sept. 11 attacks, the nimda virus infects countless a large number of computers around the globe. The virus is taken into account one among the foremost subtle, with up to 5 methods of infecting systems and replicating itself. 

Ø  2001 : president bush appoints richard clarke to function americas initial cybersecurity czar. 

Ø  2002 : melissa virus author david l. Smith, 33, is sentenced to 20 months in federal prison. 

Ø  2002 : the klez worm -- a bug that sends copies of itself to all of the e-mail addresses within the whole victims microsoft outlook directory -- begins its march across the net. The worm overwrites files and creates hidden copies of the originals. The worm too makes an attempt to disable a few common anti-virus merchandise and possesses a payload that fills files with all zeroes. Variants of the klez worm stay the foremost active on the net. 

Ø  2002 : a denial-of-service attack hits all 13 on your root servers that give the primary roadmap for nearly all internet communications. Internet users experience no slowdowns or outages due to safeguards built directly into internets design. Other then the attack -- referred to as largest ever -- raises queries relating out to the security on your core internet infrastructure. 

Ø  Jan. 2003 : the slammer worm infects countless thousands of computers in under 3 hours. The fastest-spreading worm ever wreaks havoc on businesses worldwide, knocking money machines offline and delaying airline flights.