Mark Brainliest please
Computer viruses have been around for quite a bit and nearly all of them have been spread through the Internet or its predecessors. Most viruses have been designed to steal users' information, processing power and/or disable the system all together.
The first computer virus, called "Creeper system", was an experimental self-replicating virus released in 1971. It was filling up the hard drive until a computer could not operate any further. This virus was created by BBN technologies in the US.
The first computer virus for MS-DOS was "Brain" and was released in 1986. It would overwrite the boot sector on the floppy disk and prevent the computer from booting. It was written by two brothers from Pakistan and was originally designed as a copy protection.
"The Morris" was the first Computer virus which spread extensively in the wild in 1988. It was written by Robert Morris, a graduate student from Cornell University who wanted to use it to determine the size of the internet. His approach used security holes in sendmail and other Unix applications as well as weak passwords, but due to a programming mistake it spread too fast and started to interfere with the normal operation of the computers. It infected around 15,000 computers in 15 hours, which back then was most of the internet.
Since then, many new viruses have been introduced and the trend is growing exponentially every year.
Infamous viruses of the digital age
Following are some of the most well-known or significant viruses that have grown in step with the role of information technology in society:
In 1991, the "Michelangelo" virus was first discovered in Australia. It would lay dormant until 6th March every year and then overwrite the first one hundred sectors on the storage devices with zeros, preventing the computer from booting. Only 20,000 computers were reported infected.
In 1998, CIH was released. It infected around 60 million computers and caused significant damages by overwriting important system files. It was written by a Taiwanese student.
In 1999, "Melissa" was released. This one, was the first wide spread Word Macro Virus. It was distributed via email and would automatically send itself to the first 50 people in the Outlook address book. It did not harm the computer as it was sending out passwords for some erotic websites which required membership. It caused so much email traffic resulting in email servers to crash.
2000 was the year of "iloveyou". Again, it came via email however it sent itself to all contacts. It also overwrote office, image, and audio files. The virus came from the Philippines and infected over 50 million computers in less than 10 days. Most companies back then decided to turn off their email servers to stop spreading the virus.
Since 2000, so many new viruses have been unleashed to wreak havoc on the world at large that it is difficult to list the most infamous. "Anna Kournikova", Code Red, Nimba, Beast, SQL Slammer, Blaster, Sobig, Sober, MyDoom, Netsky, Zeus, Conficker, Stuxnet, CryptoLocker, Locky, Mirai and WannaCry, are a few examples that come to mind.
