Malware today has become dinner table discussion in common household. This is quite a leap from its humble origin.
An American gas supplier's supply chain was crippled due to a ransomware attack, impacting millions of households and other establishments suffer in cold. Does this ring a bell?
You can read more about it here:
We need to discuss a few aspects of malware before we dive into history.
What is Malware
Malware is a computer program, written with malicious intent.
What does a malware do?
Purpose of a malware is to benefit a certain person or a certain organization or a certain state at the cost of loss incurred by millions of others. In simple words, malwares are designed to:
Steal data
Piggyback on someone else's computer to utilize resources like compute, storage or network
Hold critical systems or data hostage
Delete or destroy if ransom is not paid up
This begs question - How old is the practice itself of holding something (or someone) hostage, or stealing something valuable (precious metal, money, etc.) from others for self-gain?
Well, maybe as old as the human civilization itself. Malwares are not that old (no kidding).
In older days, i.e., during the heydays of computer network, hackers (or attackers) used to leverage poor configuration in devices to gain access to restricted (or private) networks. This was called vulnerability.
Purpose was to gainfully use else’s computer or network without paying a penny. In the beginning it was manual. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it did not. Hacking is tedious job, make no mistake.
Skills programmers felt that it would be easy to write a program, a code, which can reduce the effort in exploring weakness in computers and networks. This made their life easier.
This started practice of writing a malware. In initial days malwares were more of nuisance.
The creeper program was developed in 1971 as a security test to see if self-replicating programs can be coded successfully. It had no malicious intent.
The rabbit (or Wabbit) Virus was developed in 1974. It was able to replicate itself quickly once in a computer, and thus ended up crashing the PC by consuming completely. It got the name because of the speed of its replication. This was designed with malicious intent.
Brain was first PC Virus developed in 1988 by two brothers to protect their program from being copied illegally, i.e., to prevent piracy of their program. Once original program was copied, Brain would also get copied in stealth-mode and display a copyright message when program was run. This had no malicious intent.
Today the brothers run one of the largest ISP in Pakistan called Brainnet.
Disclaimer: This article represents personal view of the author and neither is endorsed by nor is official view of any organization author has been associated with.
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