Who was the first person to create a computer virus?

Answer 1

The first one I know of hit IBM in 1984 called christmas-A because CHRISTMAS was truncated to CHRISTMA due to mainframe limitations at the time. It was created by a German student in a college that IBM sponsored. What it did was lock out your keyboard (on you dumb terminal) and send all your email history to everyone in your email log with the virus as a tag-along. This filled up the shadow servers worldwide really quick and nailed IBM for 2-3 weeks.

Answer 2

The first virus was made in Chauburji, Lahore, Pakistan, 1986

Two programmers named Basit and Amjad Farooq Alvi, .replace the executable code in the boot sector of a floppy disk with their own code designed to infect each 360kb floppy accessed on any drive. Infected floppies had "© Brain" for a volume label.

　

When they were persecuted in 1988 they firstly denied any involvement in this and claimed to have no idea what the courts were talking about. After spending two night in Jail, which happened to be the jail where the Virus had damaged their data base they pleaded guilty after receiving cuts, blows and injuries to their body and wanted to appologise to the public.

　

They were taken to court by IBM companies for affecting their computers. They were fined RS. 937200 (rupees) which is $20000 (American dollars).

　

They did not learn from their mistakes but created many other viruses and started having many young computer students join their plan for world domination. They created an underground army and many people had contributed to creating well known internet viruses such as, the Trojan, My Doom, Slammer and The Klez virus was created by these people.

Finally after spending 6 nights in jail they came out, with one broken leg, 7 broken fingers, Basit has 3 and Amjad had four and broken toes. They were fined yet again and lost everything and were broke living with their relatives. After 2 years Basit won the lottery and Basit and Amjad opened up their own company/business in Pakistan as Internet service providers and called their company, called Brain Limited. They give extremely cheap rates due to less popularity.

Answer 3

Viruses have a long history. The first recognised one was called the Creeper Virus. It was designed in 1971 by Bob Thomas at BBN Technologies. It was a self replicating program that got out of hand infected the companies computers and got out onto the Arpnet before it was halted. The message "I'm the creeper, catch me if you can!" was displayed on the screens of infected computers. Prior to this the term virus wasn't used.

The first officially recognised virus "in the wild" - which means on the Internet (that also resulted in a criminal conviction) is called the Morris Worm. It is called the first because it became the first to spread rapidly via the Internet, rather than through floppy disc transfer.

The original intent of the worm was to test the size of the internet, not cause damage. Unfortunately as a result of a bug in the code, it quickly got out of hand and crashed networks all over the Internet. Estimates as to the number of computer and dollars in damage widely vary.

The designer of the Morris Worm was Cornell student (he is now a professor at Cornell) Robert Tappan Morris on Nov 2 1988.

He was convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Answer 4

The Creeper virus was first detected on ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet in the early 1970s
According to Garcia, the virus, called Creeper, was written in 1971 by Cambridge, Mass.-based BBN computer programmer Robert (Bob) Thomas. BBN, which stands for Bold, Beranek and Newman (and today is now Raytheon BBN Technologies), built packet switching networks for ARPANET. If you don't already know, ARPANET was the precursor to the Internet. It was a DARPA-sponsored network launched in December, 1969, and populated by universities, government institutions and some technology companies.

Answer 5

The first virus was made in Chauburji, Lahore, Pakistan, 1986Two programmers named Basit and Amjad Farooq Alvi, .replace the executable code in the boot sector of a floppy disk with their own code designed to infect each 360kb floppy accessed on any drive. Infected floppies had " Brain" for a volume label.

Answer 6

Fred Cohan http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3257165.stm

Answer 7

"The Creeper virus", it displays the message "I AM THE CREEPER: CATCH ME IF YOU CAN"

Answer 8

Muhammad Rashed-ul Islam( Bangladesh)

Answer 9

The "Gay Gavin" Virus, in 1989.