TYPES OF VIRUSES

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ILOVEYOU VIRUS

The I Love You virus spread quickly among users of Microsoft Outlook and corporate networks that use the Microsoft Exchange e-mail server because it sends a copy of itself to every e-mail address in a recipient’s Outlook address book. By contrast, the “Melissa” virus, which spread around the globe in 1999, sent itself only to the first 50 people on a victim’s address book.

The alleged authors of the worm were Filipinos. Siblings Irene and Onel de Guzman, Reomel Lamores and Micheal Buenafe.

There are a couple of things about this that are awesome:

1. 5 Hours. 3 continents.

2. Filipino programmers, who were not even programmers by profession, were the authors. They didn’t even study in a school that belong to the top 5 universities in the Philippines.

3. Come to think of it, we discovered a brilliant hacker. Someone CIA will gladly sacrifice ten of its highly ranked combat men for one. Unfortunately, our politicians didn’t see that. What they saw is an opportunity to display their brilliant ability to make a fool of themselves by summoning a man who did not do anything illegal. Now, [i heard] these dudes are out of the country, working for a European country’s government. Our stupidity, their brilliance. Story of our lives.

4. They clearly defined their role in the world. All gazillionaires need an evil, heartless genius that can match their brilliance and facepunch them with a single brilliant move that can make them realize, these poor nobodies – with the power of binary codes – can infiltrate their lives, steal their money, make their life miserable. They can, they just chose not to. These programmers are those poor geniuses.

5. I Love You Virus is the closest thing we ever had to an actual Terminator Skynet or 2001 Space Odyssey HAL. If there is a set of human beings in the world who might ever possibly build a dev

ice to control all devices in the world to attack us unless we kneel down in front of them and kiss their assh0h0l3s, they are it.

6. One of them, Onel in particular, actually ADMITTED he was the one who set the virus free but didn’t admit to writing it. He committed a bad@$$ act and admitted it. I am not freakin’ worthy of this god of all awesome human beings! He did it knowing all those balding has-beens in the senate will not be able to do anything because our ever reliable lawmakers didn’t write any law that pertains to any act on the world wide web. $uck3rs.

7. The virus’ concept of networking is so simple. In a world overflowing with vain people who claw clasp every opportunity to boost their ego, why will they not open an email that professes love for them. Sh!th3@ds. It’s actually a timeless trick for tasteless people. Someone makes you feel special, you fall for it. Then it destroy your life.

8. It relied on a flawed Microsoft algorithm for hiding file extensions. Microsoft… flawed… Bill Gates… one of the richest man in the world that employs the brightest in the world… outsmarted… by AMA students. HA!

The first computer viruses (THE CREEPER)

The Creeper virus was first detected on ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet, in the early 1970s.^[70] Creeper was an experimental self-replicating program written by Bob Thomas at BBN Technologies in 1971.^[71] Creeper used the ARPANET to infect DEC PDP-10computers running the TENEX operating system.^[72] Creeper gained access via the ARPANET and copied itself to the remote system where the message, "I'm the creeper, catch me if you can!" was displayed. The Reaper program was created to delete Creeper.^[73]

In 1982, a program called "Elk Cloner" was the first personal computer virus to appear "in the wild"—that is, outside the single computer or lab where it was created.^[74] Written in 1981 by Richard Skrenta, it attached itself to the Apple DOS 3.3 operating system and spread viafloppy disk.^[74][75] This virus, created as a practical joke when Skrenta was still in high school, was injected in a game on a floppy disk. On its 50th use the Elk Cloner virus would be activated, infecting the personal computer and displaying a short poem beginning "Elk Cloner: The program with a personality."

In 1984 Fred Cohen from the University of Southern California wrote his paper "Computer Viruses – Theory and Experiments".^[76] It was the first paper to explicitly call a self-reproducing program a "virus", a term introduced by Cohen's mentor Leonard Adleman. In 1987, Fred Cohen published a demonstration that there is no algorithm that can perfectly detect all possible viruses.^[77] Fred Cohen's theoretical compression virus^[78] was an example of a virus which was not malware, but was putatively benevolent. However, antivirus professionals do not accept the concept of benevolent viruses, as any desired function can be implemented without involving a virus (automatic compression, for instance, is available under the Windows operating system at the choice of the user). Any virus will by definition make unauthorised changes to a computer, which is undesirable even if no damage is done or intended. On page one of Dr Solomon's Virus Encyclopaedia, the undesirability of viruses, even those that do nothing but reproduce, is thoroughly explained.^[2]

An article that describes "useful virus functionalities" was published by J. B. Gunn under the title "Use of virus functions to provide a virtual APL interpreter under user control" in 1984.^[79]

The first IBM PC virus in the wild was a boot sector virus dubbed (c)Brain,^[80] created in 1986 by the Farooq Alvi Brothers in Lahore, Pakistan, reportedly to deter piracy of the software they had written.^[81]

The first virus to specifically target Microsoft Windows, WinVir was discovered in April 1992, two years after the release of Windows 3.0. The virus did not contain any Windows API calls, instead relying on DOS interrupts. A few years later, in February 1996, Australian hackers from the virus-writing crew Boza created the VLAD virus, which was the first known virus to target Windows 95. In late 1997 the encrypted, memory-resident stealth virus Win32.Cabanas was released—the first known virus that targeted Windows NT (it was also able to infect Windows 3.0 and Windows 9x hosts).^[82]

Even home computers were affected by viruses. The first one to appear on the Commodore Amiga was a boot sector virus called SCA virus, which was detected in November 1987.^[83]