This picture shows a virus that is lethal to bacteria. A virus is a kind of lifeform that is actually not a lifeform. It doesn’t have cells, it doesn’t age, it doesn’t eat, it doesn’t piss or shit or anything else a lifeform should do in order to be called “alife”. They cannot even reproduce themselves, like we do when a man and a woman do “the deed” getting the woman pregnant and blah blah blah. What viruses do is attach themselves to the cell of a life form and put their own DNA into that cell causing that cell to go haywire and all the cell will do is reproduce the virus over and over until the cell membranes can no longer hold the pressure of all the viruses inside itself and will ‘explode’ dying and releasing all the new viruses.
The fact that viruses are (normally) harmful and use other life forms to recreate, is exactly how computer viruses got their name, “virus”.
Now today basically any kind of malware is called a ‘virus’ but that is not completely correct. A true virus attaches itself to a file (mostly a binary executable file), causing the program to copy that virus to other files. A lot of viruses back in the old day, did only that, but were still pretty harmful as memory and disk space were pretty rare back then, so that virus copying itself over and over, would eventually cause a memory overload or your hard drive or floppy disks to be fully with useless data. And back then that was already a big problem on its own, I tell ya.
One of the first viruses I heard about was DataCrime II. It was all over the news back then. Although the virus was destructive, it didn’t cause that much damage, as it was discovered pretty early by Fred Vogel who reported this. A program was made to detect DataCrime II, however it was buggy causing false positives all the time, and but I guess, it was what you get for the first virus scanner in existence and everybody was completely new to the entire phenomenon of malware. Nobody actually knew what a virus truly was and what it could do back then.
Now believe it or not, but it’s thanks to malware that I’ll NEVER forget the birthday of the artist Michelangelo, which happens to be March, 6th. The Michelangelo virus was after DataCrime one of the first truly destructive viruses, and on March, 6th it would destroy all data on your hard drive. And I mean really destroy. It would be completely overwritten with random bytes, every single art of it making data recovery completely impossible.
Soon a lot of myths also came around viruses. Back in the 80s and 90s a lot of games were copied illegally and they were believed to cause the spread of viruses. Nothing could be further from the truth, however. Of course, copying software illegally does increase the risks, but it was rather the transfer of data in general that caused the risk. Yes, illegal copying is older than the internet, despite of what AAA software companies want you to believe. Back then we used the “Frisbee interface”. Put the data on a diskette and throw it to your recipient through the air like it were a Frisbee. And thanks to PKZIP and ARJ, this was all pretty effective :P
The first virus that struck me was the Yankee Doodle 44 virus. This virus was not really harmful in the sense of file destruction. All it did for a payload was play the song “Yankee Doodle” over the internal speaker whenever the computer clock reached 5:00pm. However since the computer belonged to my old man, he went completely berserk and of course, me as the one really into computer stuff had to take all the blame, but frankly, we don’t know where the virus came from, and we still don’t know and it’s unlikely we’ll ever find out more than 20 years after the event. Then again, I’ve been blamed for a lot of computer trouble, without proper reason other than that I knew most about computer in our family, and this incident is just the top of the iceberg when it comes to a long story I don’t wanna talk about here.
And then the Larry 222 point myth, which was also a famous myth which scared the crap out of people. Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards was one of the first AAA games revolving around sex, and THAT was a bit of a revolution on its own. The game was super controversial, and thus everybody wanted to have it, and it became one of the most pirated games ever. Al Lowe of Sierra already said in an interview that they knew. And how did they know? Because they sold more hint books than games (we didn’t have GameFAQs.com back then). Now the maximum score you can get in Larry is 222 points. According to the myth the game would destroy your hard drive if you would manage to finish the game with the full 222 points.
Now, which software developer in his right mind would ever do something completely demented as that? Sierra truly wouldn’t. The truth is that since the game was pirated so much it would bound to catch a virus somewhere, and that happened, and some somebody was secretly playing Larry at work, the virus activated and spread over all the internal network causing all computers to malfunction and even lose data, causing a lot of damage in the process. Well that is NOT Sierra’s fault. You can’t hold them responsible for something a game copied without their permission does (since aside from viruses, the game was also cracked, as the copy protection in the game was disabled by crackers, meaning the game was already modified in a certain sense, even without that virus). And that story caused a lot of hysteria.
Now Sierra is not exactly oblivious to this myth. In fact they even satirized it. In Space Quest IV a super computer caught a virus bringing the world into a big mess, because somebody played Leisure Suit Larry on it. Coincidence? I think not. And when you finish Leisure Suit Larry - Love for Sail, you will suddenly see
C:\>Format C: /y
Format completed
C:\>
And only a few seconds after you’ll see the message “Just kidding!”
Now one of the first viruses (or rather a worm) to cause a real disaster was the “Love Letter” virus, also known as “iloveyou”. It accesses the contact list of your e-mail client and send itself to several people in that list and overwrote files on your system with itself, if you were foolish enough to open the “I-LOVE-YOU” attachment in the mail with the “iloveyou” subject. The damage caused by the Love Letter virus has been estimated to approx fifteen billion U.S. dollars.
Or $15,000,000,000 !!! Just a write out to make you see how much money we’re talking about!!!
The joke is that this worm is just a text file containing VBScript. However as Windows was back then configured to automatically open VBS files in the VBScript interpreter, and people opening an attachment always doing that without thinking, the virus could activate easily. The code used to create the virus was not really new either, it was actually pretty old, and according to some people even pretty amateur, however, this is precisely why the worm was so effective. Nobody ever even thought about using such simple VBScripts to create a virus before, not even the guys bringing us the anti-virus software, and the fact that Windows auto-opens all VBScripts from e-mails made that the virus could spread pretty quickly and as the attachment didn’t look harmful (it wasn’t an executable binary after all) and Windows automatically hiding extensions like .exe, .com and .vbs the prefect circumstances to cause a lot of damage were created, and I guess some very important lessons were taught that day. ~~ (Although I can’t get the notion out of my head that Apple abused this virus to come up with their current block-all-non-AppStore-downloads-policy).~~
And here folks you got a quick overview of a few historical facts about viruses.
Now malware is nothing to be hysterical about. In fact, raging in hysteria is what malware developers want you to do, so that is the worst thing you can do. Always make sure you back-up your work frequently, and have a DECENT virus scanner installed can prevent a lot of trouble, and even better, don’t download stuff mindlessly without tracking the download can be trusted. And don’t open attachment from e-mails that don’t make sense (not even when they come from people you trust. I think the Love Letter virus proved that). As a matter of fact, only open attachments when you actually expect attachment from those specific senders. There is no golden formula to protect you against malware, but as long as you always keep calm about it you’ve won some important battles. ;)
1 comment