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Letters posted here are associated with the following article:
The letters thread is now closed.
In August 1985, I wrote a trojan that was one of the first nasty bits of PC software. I was trying to put a pirate BBS out of business. I uploaded a small com file that promised to be a game enhancer and it trashed his system diskette. The BBS operator was up a week later, claiming that the dog ate his diskette.
I rewrote the program and had it print the words, "Arf Arf I got you" and uploaded it again as a file that claimed to get more colors out of a standard monitor.
Two days later, Arf Arf made it to the front page of the Wall Street Journal. I also heard about it on the local news radio station coming home from work.
Someone had downloaded it and then uploaded it to about 30 BBS's and then it had been spread around even more. It was estimated that tens of thousands of computers were damaged by the trojan. My guess is that far fewer were damaged, perhaps a few dozen.
I was shocked. I was trying to put a rogue BBS out of business and I wound up doing damage to innocent people. It was stupid thing to do.
...and common sense and you won't get malware.
Of course, some people will always be stupid, maybe you or even me on a bad day, so malware is probably here to stay. But you really don't have to get them. Thus the article is somewhat overstated.
Actually, the article is online, but the full text is available to subscribers only:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/317/5835/210
"The program for the very first virus was written by Frederick B. Cohen, a student
in a USC computer security class taught by professor Leonard M. Adleman.
Cohen first demonstrated a working virus publicly on Nov. 11, 1983, in Adleman's
classroom. The inspiration had come to him a week earlier, on Nov. 4, while the
professor was lecturing...."
http://www.usc.edu/uscnews/stories/465.html
Adleman, a Turing prizewinner, subsequently became famous for demonstrating that DNA could be used as a computing medium.
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