On November 11, 1983, the first virus was written, which opened a new era of dangerous programs for computers.
Fred Cohen, an American student from the University of Southern California, wrote a program that demonstrated the possibility of infecting a computer with a virus spreading speed from 5 minutes to an hour.
The next year he wrote a paper in which he not only predicted the danger of viruses spreading over a computer network, but also talked about the possibility of writing antivirus software.
The first non-laboratory virus, called "Brain", is capable of infecting only floppy disks. He appeared in January 1986 and was of Pakistani descent. And the first anti-virus program was created in 1988.
Let’s remember which viruses were the most destructive in the short history of computer networks.
10th place. Code red
The virus was launched in 2001 and infected 360,000 PCs, creating a botnet to attack the White House website. The virus gave a message on the screen "Hacked By Chinese" ("Hacked by the Chinese!") - An allusion to communist China, although in fact the virus was most likely written by ethnic Chinese in the Philippines.
9th place. Morris
In 1988, the virus infected about 60 thousand PCs via a computer network, preventing them from working normally. The damage from the Morris worm was estimated at about $ 96.5 million. The creator of the virus, Robert Morris, had a good conspiratorial code of the program, and hardly anyone could prove his involvement. However, his father, a computer expert at the National Security Agency, felt that his son had better confess everything.
At the trial, Robert Morris faced up to five years in prison, as well as a fine of $ 250 thousand, however, taking into account the extenuating circumstances, the court sentenced him to three years probation, $ 10 thousand fine and 400 hours of community service.
8th place. Blaster
In 2003, it was launched to attack Microsoft sites. Its creator was never found.
According to reports from Kaspersky Lab, around three hundred thousand PCs were infected worldwide. For the user, this worm was relatively safe, except for side effect in the form of regular computer reboots. The purpose of this worm was to attack Microsoft servers on August 16, 2003 at midnight. However, Microsoft temporarily shut down its servers to keep the damage from the virus to a minimum.
Blaster contained a hidden message in its code to Bill Gates: “Billy Gates, why are you making this possible? Enough to make money, fix your software! ".
7th place. Melissa
The author of the virus, David Smith, named his creation after a stripper from Miami. Actually, during infection, a stripper appeared on the main page. The virus caused more than $ 80 million in damage. Intel and Microsoft even had to shut down their own mail servers. Smith was arrested and sentenced to three years in prison.
6th place. CIH
The famous virus is Chernobyl, which was created by a student from Taiwan Chen Yinghali specifically for the operating systems Windows 95/98. On the anniversary of the nuclear power plant accident, April 26, the virus was activated, paralyzing the work of the PC.
According to various estimates, the virus infected about half a million PCs in the world.
On September 20, 2000, according to The Register, Taiwanese authorities arrested the creator of the famous virus, but according to Taiwanese laws at the time, he did not violate any of the laws, and he was never prosecuted for creating this virus.
Chen currently works at Gigabyte.
5th place. Nimda
Distributed by email. Has become the most shvidkorozpovyudzhuvanim virus. It only took him 22 minutes to infect millions of PCs.
4th place. Storm Worm
In 2007, the virus infected millions of PCs, spreading spam and stealing personal data.
3rd place. Slammer
Aggressive virus. 2003 destroyed data from 75 thousand computers in 10 minutes.
2nd place. Conficker
One of the most dangerous computer worms known to date.
The malware was written in Microsoft Visual C ++ and first appeared online on November 21, 2008. Attacks Microsoft Windows OS (from Windows 2000 to Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2). As of January 2009, the virus had infected 12 million PCs worldwide. On February 12, 2009 Microsoft promised $ 250 thousand for information about the creators of the virus.
1 place. I LOVE YOU
The virus was sent to mailboxes from the Philippines on the night of May 4 to May 5, 2000; the subject line contained the line “ILoveYou”, and the script “LOVE - LETTER - FOR - YOU.TXT.vbs” was attached to the letter. The extension “. Vbs "was hidden by default, which made unsuspecting users think it was a plain text file.
When the attachment was opened, the virus sent a copy of itself to all contacts in the Windows address book, as well as to the address specified as the sender's address. He also made a number of drastic changes to the user's system.
In total, the virus has infected over 3 million computers. The estimated damage caused by the worm to the global economy is estimated at $ 10-15 billion, for which it entered the Guinness Book of Records as the most destructive virus in the world.
Hackers have improved this mechanism so that the virus can write its own code not only at the end of the file, but also at the beginning of the file, or in the middle, and even in several places. Fortunately, modern anti-virus software deals with such problems quite easily, of course, if the virus code is known to the creators of such software. When the virus is already loaded into memory, it begins to do its destructive work. More often than not, in the meantime, the program is launched - the host, everything so that the user does not know that he or she has a virus on his system.
The first non-laboratory virus, called "Brain", capable of infecting only floppy disks, appeared in January 1986 and was of Pakistani origin. And the first anti-virus program was developed in 1988.
Let's remember what viruses were the most destructive in the short history of computer networks.
10th place. Code red
The virus was launched in 2001 and infected 360,000 machines, creating a botnet to attack the White House website. The virus gave a message on the screen "Hacked By Chinese!" ("Hacked by the Chinese!") Is an allusion to communist China, although in reality the virus was most likely written by ethnic Chinese in the Philippines.
The second most important and very dangerous group of viruses are boot sector viruses. If the virus is not detected, it gets to the root of the system boot disk, and the next system startup can be very dangerous for your computer. This is due to the fact that the virus code takes the place of the code that is usually used at system startup. Most often, a virus that is loaded into the computer's memory then starts the system to complete masking. The idea is to keep the virus invisible for as long as possible on the system.
Viruses at startup are so dangerous that if they are not detected during infection, then it is too late, because they start working even before the system starts up, therefore before any virus protection is available. The damage that can occur to a virus from loading into memory and running antivirus programs is not possible.
9th place. Morris
In 1988, a virus infected 60,000 computers over a network, preventing them from working properly. The damage from the Morris worm was estimated at approximately $ 96.5 million.
The creator of the virus, Robert Morris, was a good conspirator of the program code, and hardly anyone could prove his involvement. However, his father, a computer expert at the National Security Agency, felt that it was better for his son to confess everything.
The system uses allocation tables to determine where a file is located on disk. The viewers of the distribution tables falsified the entries in the tables, which led to the coding of the system, and then downloaded the requested file. The guilty spirit of the files was accused of being a carrier of viruses, and the question went deeper - in the structure of the distribution tables.
The so-called macro viruses are very important types of viruses. These viruses spread among document templates, creating macros in them and waiting for the right moment when these macros are run - then they are loaded into memory and start working. What is safe and what should you pay attention to?
At the trial, Robert Morris faced up to five years in prison and a fine of $ 250 thousand, however, taking into account the extenuating circumstances, the court sentenced him to three years probation, $ 10 thousand fine and 400 hours of community service.
8th place. Blaster
It was launched in 2003 to attack Microsoft sites. Its author was never found.
Much of the fear of viruses comes from the fact that users cannot distinguish between which behavior is safe for their computers and which is not. The lack of professional literature, as well as the disgust of many users for the written word, let's think that many still believe in the myths about viruses.
The most common myth is that you can get infected by reading an email. It can be dangerous to simply view and run attachments for messages that are often the source of a computer virus. Indeed, such attachments, especially if they come from unknown senders, should be treated with extreme caution. Until recently, the myth was that you can get infected by browsing the web. Speech speech speech; Traditional rhetorical genre, including works designed for direct speech.
According to reports from Kaspersky Lab, around 300,000 computers were infected worldwide. For the user, this worm was relatively safe, apart from the side effect of regularly restarting the computer. The purpose of this worm was to attack Microsoft servers on August 16, 2003 at midnight. However, Microsoft has temporarily shut down its servers to keep the damage from the virus to a minimum.
Of course, the main task of a good anti-virus system is to ensure that there is no virus in the computer system. Antivirus software constantly monitors the system and prevents the virus from starting. Through updates over the Internet, such programs often supplement their knowledge of the latest viruses.
The main tasks of anti-virus programs are. Registry monitoring, monitoring programs at startup, monitoring inserted and readable disks and disks, monitoring every traffic to and from the Internet, basically a careful monitoring of downloaded files from the Internet, so that a quick response to files, folders and drives anti-virus scan to prevent virus downloads.It is a kind of logic bomb that performs antivirus checks according to a specific schedule to update itself, that is, it is basically a virus library. A good antivirus suite does a number of things.
Blaster contained a hidden message in its code addressed to Bill Gates: “Billy Gates, why are you making this possible? Stop making money, fix your software! "
7th place. Melissa
The author of the virus, David Smith, named his creation after a stripper from Miami. Actually, during infection, a stripper appeared on the home page. The virus caused more than $ 80 million in losses. Microsoft and Intel even had to shut down their own mail servers.
First of all, it must block viruses before they are initialized. This prevents infection, rather than tiresome and often impossible to remove its consequences. Blocking is the computer equivalent of a real statement that prevention is better than cure. When such a blocking program detects a file that may be suspicious for infection, it immediately displays a warning informing the user and also prompts for instructions on how to proceed.
Unfortunately, it often happens that blockers cannot protect against all viruses. Therefore, in addition to programs of this type, the antivirus package must include applications that can recognize the effects of the virus and are able to "cure" the system. Programs of this type perform disk scanning and when detecting infections, they try to remove its effects. This is often associated not only with the deletion of the infected file, but also with the recovery of some data that was destroyed by a virus. There is also a method called quarantine files that allows you to unload a file from a virus without deleting it.
Smith was arrested and sentenced to three years in prison.
6th place. CIH
The famous Chernobyl virus, which was written by Taiwanese student Chen Yinghao specifically for Windows 9598 operating systems. On April 26, the anniversary of the nuclear power plant accident, the virus was activated, paralyzing computers.
First, it is worth knowing the history of these unusual programs. The first virus was written by American programmer Robert Morris Jr. That was 24 years ago. A sophisticated computer scientist was punished with social work and a fine. By definition, a computer virus is simply code whose main purpose is to damage, completely destroy the operating system or even hardware. Self-fertilization, as is the case with biological counterfeits, is the first feature that shows that we can talk about computer viruses.
According to various estimates, the virus affected about half a million personal computers worldwide.
According to The Register, on September 20, 2000, the Taiwanese authorities arrested the creator of the famous computer virus, but according to the Taiwanese laws of those times, he did not violate any laws, and he was never prosecuted for creating this virus.
Today's viral world is a bit like the one it was a few years ago. The time to write code for the "pleasure" of the programmer is long overdue. Currently, programs of this type are primarily designed to collect information aimed at specific purposes - not necessarily the number of copies issued.
There was a decisive strategy. Both groups have one thing in common, regardless of the spread of viruses, the creators of these programs are designed for profit. The total annual drug trade around the world is no longer able to keep up with the profits it generates: deliberate data leaks and sales, viruses - spam, or illegal advertising.
Chen currently works at Gigabyte.
5th place. Nimda
Distributed by email. Has become the fastest spreading virus. It took him only 22 minutes to infect millions of computers.
4th place. Storm Worm
In 2007, the virus infected millions of computers by sending spam and stealing personal data.
The problem of computer viruses and related threats - malware is a common problem, the lack of installed software makes us defenseless when browsing the Internet. It is wrong to think that you do not need to have a pandemic virus to use only trusted websites. Watching the Internet or receiving mail, we can never be sure that the creator of a new virus has not exploited an unknown vulnerability in the system that he uses to attack our computer.
Emerging dangers - software
In such cases, a good antivirus program will be the first line of defense for our system and our private data. The strategies for writing computer viruses have changed in recent years. Recently, viruses and worms were created primarily to infect as many machines as possible. Today antivirus software are the biggest threat to Internet users. Cybercriminals were bored that they were attacking Internet users and decided to make a living by illegally taking over credit card numbers, gaining access to social networking sites, selling at auctions and thereby stealing their victims.
3rd place. Slammer
The most aggressive virus. In 2003, he destroyed data from 75 thousand computers in 10 minutes.
2nd place. Conficker
One of the most dangerous computer worms known to date.
The malicious program was written in Microsoft Visual C ++ and first appeared on the Internet on November 21, 2008. It attacks operating systems of the Microsoft Windows family (from Windows 2000 to Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2). As of January 2009, the virus had infected 12 million computers worldwide. On February 12, 2009 Microsoft promised $ 250 thousand for information about the creators of the virus.
Crime is nothing more than a virus, worm, or Trojan to put in an afterburner. Its task is no longer to block the system and is invisible, remaining in the system, collecting information, redirecting to fake sites such as a bank - a double glance also from the point of view of the address.
Computer virus - definition
Of course, this is not so, but a significant part of the authors of the so-called "Viruses - Trojans" cooperate with real criminal groups. The criminal world is moving into the virtual sphere. This is a code created for self-correction. Yes, to spread to other computers. A computer virus can damage your system and even your computer hardware. Computer viruses are very similar in behavior to their biological counterparts.
1 place. I LOVE YOU
The virus was sent to mailboxes from the Philippines on the night of May 4 to May 5, 2000; the subject line contained the line “ILoveYou”, and the script “LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs” was attached to the letter. The ".vbs" extension was hidden by default, which made unsuspecting users think it was a plain text file.
When the attachment was opened, the virus sent a copy of itself to all contacts in the Windows address book, as well as to the address specified as the sender's address. He also made a number of malicious changes to the user's system.
The ingenuity of computer viruses
Computer virus writers do not stop at their laurels for developing new methods of attacking computers. Cybercriminals use media events such as the death of Osama bin Laden or the royal wedding in England, seductive surfers with incredible information, photos, etc. the movie below is unfortunately in English.
Computer virus and user knowledge
Please be aware that computer viruses really based on the ignorance of the users. Developers use the same method that hackers use.