Today, we continue to deal with the pesky and often highly destructive effects of increasingly powerful computer viruses.Ĭonsider yourself a cybersecurity history buff? Share your feedback with us on Twitter. It was not deliberately harmful, but it did damage some disks and otherwise cause annoyance by displaying the following poem on infected computers every 50th boot:
It spread by way of a then-state-of-the-art, removable storage technology - the floppy disk - to become the first major computer virus outbreak. Written in 1982 by a 15-year-old high school student named Richard Skrenta, it was a boot sector virus that infected Apple II computers. Following Creeper, which was isolated within the realm of researchers, Elk Cloner was the first personal computer virus to be detected in the wild.
So, Creeper was the first computer virus, but it certainly wasn’t the last - as we all know. Doing so primarily out of scientific curiosity, he had fun in naming it as well - Creeper was a mysterious ghoulish green bank robber on the popular ’70s cartoon show, “Scooby-Doo.” Its creator had simply wanted to create an experimental, self-duplicating program to illustrate that it was possible. It only displayed its taunting challenge. It didn’t encrypt files, demand a ransom, destroy data, steal Social Security numbers, or render centrifuges inoperable. In this case, its targets were Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) computers which were linked to ARPANET.īut it wasn’t malware like we associate with today’s computer viruses displaying its enigmatic message was all Creeper did. One of its researchers, Bob Thomas, had created Creeper as an experimental computer program.Ĭreeper was a worm - a type of computer virus that replicates itself and spreads to other systems. Bold, Beranek, and Newman* (now Raytheon BBN Technologies) were pioneers in packet switching networks like ARPANET and the internet. It turns out it wasn’t a hacker who coded the first computer virus, and it wasn’t sent with malicious intent. But what did the mysterious message mean, and who sent it? Imagine theirsurprise when one day in 1971, connected teletype computer screens displayed the phrase: “I’m the creeper, catch me if you can!”Īlthough they didn’t know it at the time, they were the first computer virus victims.
It’s few early users were mostly computer scientists. To achieve this required a method of dividing and sending data that is now known as packet switching. It was designed to send communications from computer to computer over long distances, without the need for a dedicated phone connection between each computer. Jeepers Creepers – it’s a worm!Īn experimental computer network, ARPANET, was created in 1969 and was the precursor to the internet. But it was another 30 years before someone created one. He envisioned a computer virus as an automatically self-replicating entity. German mathematician and father of game theory John von Neumann first theorized the concept in the late 1940s. The idea of a computer virus preceded computer networks. If you think we missed an important fact (or didn’t get something quite right), please share your feedback with us on Twitter. The second post delves into the origins of SSL and web security.
#Creepr in the corner series
The first in the series examines Operation Aurora and the series of 2010 cyberattacks by the Chinese Elderwood Group, which has ties to the People’s Liberation Army. This is the third in a series of posts featuring information about interesting historical events in cybersecurity.
#Creepr in the corner how to
How to afk mine in minecraft pe.At Exabeam, as people who live and breathe cybersecurity, we’re naturally fascinated by its history.