In my personal view, it is nothing but glorifying the innate destructive/mischievous human instinct!
Rajesh ----- Original Message ----- From: "vishnu ramchandani" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Tuesday, September 04, 2007 9:58 AM Subject: [AI] Making the first virus Making the first virus 25 years after creating the first computer virus, the programmer looks back at what he started AP Rich Skrenta created the first computer virus, back in 1982, as a harmless prank on his schoolmates What began as a ninth-grade school prank, a way to trick his already-suspicious friends who had fallen for his earlier practical jokes, has earned american Rich Skrenta notoriety as the first person ever to let loose a personal computer virus. Although over the next 25 years, Skrenta started the online news business Topix, helped launch a collaborative Web directory now owned by Time Warner Inc's Netscape and wrote countless other computer programs, he is still remembered most for unleashing 'Elk Cloner' on the world. "It was some dumb little practical joke," Skrenta, now 40, said. "I guess if you had to pick between being known for this and not being known for anything, I'd rather be known for this. But it's an odd placeholder for (all that) I've done." 'Elk Cloner' - which self-replicated like all other viruses - bears little resemblance to the malicious programs of today. Yet in retrospect, it was a harbinger of all the security headaches that would only grow as more people got computers - and eventually connected them with one another over the Internet. Skrenta's friends were already distrusting him because, in swapping computer games and other software as part of piracy circles which were common at the time, Skrenta often altered the floppy disks he gave out to launch taunting on-screen messages. Many friends simply started refusing disks from him. So during a break from school, Skrenta hacked away on his Apple II computer - the dominant personal computer then - and figured out how to get the code to launch those messages onto disks automatically. THE FIRST VIRUS He developed what is known as a 'boot sector virus'. When it boots, or starts up, an infected disk places a copy of the virus in the computer's memory. Whenever someone inserts a clean disk into the machine and types the command 'catalog' for a list of files, a copy of the virus gets written onto that disk as well. The newly infected disk is passed on to other people, other machines and other locations. The prank, though annoying to victims, is relatively harmless compared with the viruses of today. Every 50th time someone booted an infected disk, a poem Skrenta wrote would appear, saying in part, "It will get on all your disks; it will infiltrate your chips." Skrenta started circulating the virus in early 1982 among friends at his school and at a local computer club. Years later, he would continue to hear stories of other victims, including a sailor during the first Gulf War nearly a decade later. Skrenta poses with his first personal computer, on which he wrote the program SETTING A PRECEDENT ? Skrenta's virus was just the tip of iceberg. With the growth of the Internet came a new way to spread viruses: email. 'Melissa' (1999), 'Love Bug' (2000) and 'SoBig' (2003) are among the most famous of this variety. Although some of the early viruses overwhelmed networks, later ones corrupted documents or had other destructive properties. Compared with early threats, "the underlying technology is similar, (but) the things viruses can do once they get hold of the computer has changed dramatically," said Richard Ford, a US-based computer science professor at the Florida Institute of Technology. Later, viruses spread through instant-messaging and file-sharing software. More recently, they have been created to steal personal data such as passwords or to create relay stations for making junk email more difficult to trace. Although worldwide outbreaks aren't as common these days, "believe it or not, there's exponentially more malware today than there ever was," said Dave Marcus, a research manager for McAfee's Avert Labs. "We find 150 to 175 new pieces of malware every single day. Five years ago, it would have been maybe 100 new pieces a week." But even as corporations and Internet service providers step up their defences, virus writers are looking to emerging platforms, including mobile devices and Web-based services like social-networking sites. THE BLAME GAME That's not to say Skrenta should get the blame anytime someone gets spam sent through a virus-enabled relay or finds a computer slow to boot because of a lingering pest. After all, there is no evidence that most virus writers even knew of Skrenta or his craft. Fred Cohen, a security expert who wrote his PhD dissertation in 1986 on computer viruses, said the conditions were right, and with more and more homes getting computers, "it was all a matter of time before this happened." In fact, a number of viruses preceeded the 'Elk Cloner', although they were experimental or limited in scope. Many consider Skrenta's to be the first true virus because it spread in the wild on the dominant home computers of its day. "You had other people even at the time saying, 'We had this idea, we even coded it up, but we thought it was awful and we never released it'," said Skrenta. And where was his restraint? Skrenta cheekily replies: "I was in the ninth grade." Why delete messages? Unlimited storage is just a click away. Go to http://help.yahoo.com/l/in/yahoo/mail/yahoomail/tools/tools-08.html To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. 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