Thread: The spread of computer Viruses

When Fred Cohen, a student at the University of Southern California, wrote a thesis on the possibility that computers would need to be defended from malicious programs, nobody guessed that he was laying the grounds for a $3.8 billion industry. In 1984, Cohen published a paper titled "Computer Viruses: Theory and Experiments" that not every professor would allow his students to go through today. The paper described the structure of a theoretical program which could multiply and carry out commands without the user's knowledge: the conceptualization of the first virus.



Everything was going fine in the mideighties; and if a file ever disappeared, it was most likely due to a program error or simple carelessness on the part of the user. But only a couple of years later, a new type of virus started emerging- the so-called polymorphic type of virus could change itself and encrypt its malicious payload. Many firms in the still-nascent antivirus industry couldn't deal with the new advancement, and threw in their towels. The few that remained had to clean up the fallout of virus construction kits, which started becoming quite popular and allowed every PC novice to program malware and cause billions of dollars' worth of damage.