Cybercrime History: Computer Viruses And What Are They?

1977 words - 8 pages

The history of cybercrime goes back to 1971 and the first computer virus called the Creeper which was created by Bob H. Thomas, who was a BBN engineer (Dalakov, Meltzer, and Phillips). BBN which stands for Bolt, Beranek and Newman, is now Raytheon BBN Technologies (“About”, Dalakov). A computer virus is a program that is created to cause damage to a computer or perform other malicious acts (204). The Creeper virus was designed to infect the ARPANET network. The ARPANET, which stands for Advance Research Projects Agency was set up by the U.S. Government as an agency in 1969 to provide a network of computers that would connect various academic and research organizations; it was the predecessor of the Internet (“Internet”, Morley, and Parker).
The creeper was not really nasty, the “infected computers would simply display the message, I'm the creeper: catch me if you can” the computers did not suffer any lasting damage (Benford 112, Meltzer, and Phillips). The Creeper virus was an experiment of a self-replicating program, not designed to damage but to demonstrate a mobile application (Dalakov). Self means doing on its shelf (“Self”). Replicating means repeating over and over again in exact the same way (“Replicate”). Both these words are combined as Self–replicate is to copy itself automatically (“Self-replicating”).
A computer program is executable software that runs on a PC or computer system (Christensson). An executable file is a type in a computer file that runs a program when it opens (Christensson). Software is the instructions tell the computer what to do (“Software”). Software is the entire set of programs, procedures, and routines associated with the operation of a computer system, including the operating system (“Software”). It was the first worm in the computer world. It was little more than to an annoyance most sources say (Dalakov).
A worm is a computer program that duplicates but doesn't infect other files: instead, it installs itself on a victim computer and then looks for a way to spread itself to other computers (Worm). The first part of the anti-virus software was created as a straightforward reply to the creeper's test (Dalakov, Meltzer, and Phillips). “The Reaper was also a self-replicating program, which spread through the” computer “system in much the same way as the Creeper had, and it removed the offending virus from infected computers (Meltzer, and Phillips). “Just as quickly as it had spread, the Creeper was caught” (Dalakov, Meltzer, and Phillips).
In 1982, the first personal computer virus, called Elk Cloner, was written by Rich Skrenta, a high school student (May, "A Brief History of Malware"). He developed a boot sector virus. What is a boot sector virus? A boot sector virus works when the computer boots up the infected floppy disk or hard disk (hard drive) it replaces the code from the computer and makes its own code (Jesdanun, Boot sector virus). The computer hard drive is the primary...

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