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Boot & Program Viruses
Boot and program viruses were the first viruses. They are generally made of executable code that hides inside device boot programs and application programs, and are usually targeted for a specific computer operating system. These were the earliest types of computer viruses developed, and remained relatively common in the wild until overtaken in 1998 by script and macro viruses. Boot viruses. Boot viruses hide in the boot code for a media device, such as a disk or CD, and run automatically when the media is loaded since boot programs are always the first code loaded from any device. Boot viruses proliferated on floppy disks and even CD's into the late 1990's, but aren't seen as often these days with the decline in importance of transferable, bootable media. The first computer boot virus was built by a 15 year old kid named Rich Skrenta in 1982 for Apple II computers. Called “Elk Cloner”, it would activate whenever a floppy disk was booted on a computer, install itself on the computer, and then infect other disks used later. Once every 50 times an infected floppy was inserted in a computer it would display the following message. Elk Cloner: The program with a personality It will get on all your disks It will stick to you like glue Skrenta launched the virus into the wild in early 1982 by infecting his school’s computer and giving out disks at a computer club. Since viruses were not yet known and there were no safegaurds, it spread around the country and continued to pop up on Apple II computers for years afterwards. The first boot virus to infect Microsoft computers was called Brain, developed in 1986 by two Pakistani brothers, and displayed the phone number of their computer repair business. Program viruses. Program
viruses can travel on media like a CD or across the Internet by
email attachment. They hide in an apparently useful program and then run
when the program is opened. They are often called trojan
horse viruses, after the hollow wooden horse containing soldiers that
Ulysses and the Greeks gave to Minerva during the Trojan war, and from
which the soldiers emerged that night to open the gates of the city of
Troy to the Greek armies, thereby causing the city's downfall. Virus infection. A greeting card program emailed to you from a friend
might display a holiday animation and song, while at the same time installing
a remote access virus program that gives a distant hacker control over your
computer whenever you're connected to the Internet. Similarly, a shareware
program downloaded and emailed to you by another friend might have been infected
with a virus on his computer or the server where it was stored. |
