When Did Computer Virus Was Born?

Every time my computer crashes on me because of some pest called virus, I wonder when viruses actually came to being. And so here’s a brief history of when computer virus was first discovered…

In November 10, 1983, a University of Southern California graduate student Fred Cohen demonstrated a computer virus during a seminar at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. What he did was to insert his proof of concept code into a Unix command. Within five minutes into the system, Cohen was able to gain control of the whole mainframe computer.

In other demonstrations, the code managed to bypass all of the security measures that are installed in mainframe computers at that time—and the code did the bypassing within half an hour on average.

But until then, it was only referred to as a “code.” It is Cohen’s professor, Len Adleman, who coined the term virus for the self-replication program.

Cohen’s virus, however, is not the first of its kind. Other “worms,” “bugs” and viruses were found in earlier years than 1983. There was the Elk Cloner program that infects Apple II back in 1982 and the “Brain” by two Pakistani brothers in 1986.

In 1988, there was also Robert Tappan Moris Jr., a Cornell University graduate and son of a National Security Agency chief scientist, who first unleashed a widely propagating worm through the Internet.

But until the mid-1990s, the growth of viruses and worms were fairly slow. It was only during the proliferation of desktop PCs and emails that we found ourselves open to large-scale computer viruses. The Melissa virus in 1992 was the first fast-moving virus that reached about 250,000 computers.

A year later, a student from the Philippines crafted an “I love you” virus that spread over 55 million computers, and infected some 2.5 to 3 million. Its estimated cost of damage reached $10 billion.

Since then, viruses and other forms of worms have been rampant in the Internet. The motives of its creators have become diverse as well—from hacking to stealing Internet identities. But luckily, we have also developed new kinds of anti-virus software that can protect our computers and laptops from viruses.