When was computer viruses discovered

The era of devastating viruses began in Up until then, most viruses were just jokes with funny names and messages.

But things changed when the Festering Hate virus first appeared. Instead of infecting floppy disks and hard drives, it infected and destroyed every file on hard drives, memory drives, and floppy disks.

So people would be advised to simply avoid using their computers on this day. In the mids, viruses also started conquering the internet and spreading via emails and websites.

The virus affected over 50 million computers in less than ten days and became one of the most viral computer viruses ever. SQL Slammer, developed in , was so quick to spread, it crashed the internet less than 30 minutes after it was launched.

Computer viruses came up with a new distribution channel during this decade - social media. Now, clueless Facebook or Twitter users could be tricked into clicking malicious ads, suspicious links on their walls or in direct messages. You need to activate a trigger - a program where the virus lives. To let it out, you need to either click on it or download it on your computer.

When the virus is activated, it then infects all computers in the same network. Imagine you receive a real looking email from a reputable source: your bank, some official organization, or a well-known brand. This is a kind of phishing email where the goal is to tempt you into downloading an attachment or opening an image.

Also, pay attention to pop-up messages you see when downloading files - they may follow a malicious intent. This is how viruses first started spreading. Malvertising is an advertisement with malware inside. Those times when viruses were funny and just switched your screen upside-down are long gone. Modern viruses are designed to steal your data, preferably banking information, and use it for their own unscrupulous ends.

So every internet user needs a powerful antivirus to secure their digital lives and privacy. A digital content writer passionate about tech, marketing, and cybersecurity. Malware Threats. Android Security. Computing Cybersecurity. Ventana al Conocimiento Knowledge Window. Estimated reading time Time 4 to read. The first viruses were technological demonstrations and the motivation of their creators was research. In , Brain appeared, a virus created by two Pakistani brothers whose purpose was to punish the users who installed a pirated copy of software.

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Thank you for collaborating with the OpenMind community! Your comment will be published after validation. Please, try again later. No longer confined to floppy disks or company networks, malware was now able to spread very quickly via email, via popular websites or even directly over the Internet.

As a result, modern malware began to take shape. The threat landscape became a mixed environment shared by viruses, worms and Trojans—hence the name "malware" as an umbrella term for malicious software. One of the most serious epidemics of this new era was the LoveLetter, which appeared on May 4, As Securelist notes, it followed the pattern of earlier email viruses of the time, but unlike the macro viruses that had dominated the threat landscape since , it didn't take the form of an infected Word document, but arrived as a VBS file.

It was simple and straightforward, and since users hadn't learned to be suspicious of unsolicited emails, it worked. Since the message often came to new victims from someone familiar, they were more likely to open it, making ILOVEYOU a proof-of-concept for the effectiveness of social engineering. The Code Red worm was a "file less" worm—it existed only in memory and made no attempt to infect files on the system.

Taking advantage of a flaw in the Microsoft Internet Information Server, the fast-replicating worm wreaked havoc by manipulating the protocols that allow computers to communicate and spread globally in just hours. Eventually, as noted in Scientific American , compromised machines were used to launch a distributed denial of service attack on the Whitehouse. One of the most recent of the major viruses came out in , Heartbleed burst onto the scene and put servers across the Internet at risk.

Heartbleed, unlike viruses or worms, stems from a vulnerability in OpenSSL, a general purpose, open source cryptographic library used by companies worldwide. OpenSSL periodically sends out "heartbeats" to ensure that secure endpoints are still connected.