If you’ve ever had to spend a lot of money on antivirus software, you’d be forgiven for wanting to take Dr Fred Cohen aside for, to put it politely, a few choice words…
After a neighbouring university created a Trojan horse – which allowed hackers to gain access to a machine – Dr Cohen realised that the Trojan could be programmed to duplicate itself.
This is the proverbial lightbulb going off.“I was sitting there in the class and all of a sudden it dawned on me that if that Trojan horse copied itself into other programs, then all those programs would be infected, and then everybody that ran any of those programs would get infected and so forth.
“It was at that point immediately obvious that it was game over…”
Dr Cohen believes that genuine research into possible threats has not happened for quite some time.
“As far as I can tell, somewhere around the late eighties or early nineties was the end of the real research related to computer viruses.
“There are businesses that want to make sure they keep making money by having cures that fix the last one, but not the next one.”
NO! Say it isn’t so.
This mutated into H1N3.
If not him, it would have been someone else. I liken this to the people who post “First” on comments.
What nice guy to invite to a party
At least Linux has few viruses , at least for now
We should be *thanking* him! When the alien invaders come, flying their Mac-compatible spaceships, it’s computer viruses that will allow us to defeat them.
#4 DannyBoy – teehee “Independence Day”. I thought the same thing when I saw it the first time.
@DannyBoy97 & @TML,
My geekiness asked how the aliens knew about the TCP/IP protocol for the network communications. Maybe that is where DARPA got the idea, Roswell reverse engineering?!?!?
Indeed, if not him, it would have been someone else, but the point of all this, it’s that all this viruses and exploits in software and hardware allow companies to build better next generation products, most of the time, fixing previous flaws, making them more secure and robust, again, most of the time.
Viruses and exploits are part of the reason of evolution in tech, just like everything else in our existence.
AVG Free Edition does the trick for me. That, and not being stupid and opening email attachments.
Crucify him!!!
But weren’t the first viruses rather benign? They didn’t damage anything, they didn’t spy on you, they didn’t cause ads to appear. They just made all your text fall to the bottom of your screen, or give some pro-marijuana message appear on screen.
What’s his email address?
#2 and #7
Definitely, it doesn’t make any difference who used it first. This is the guy who got the credit, big deal. It’s sort of like M$ taking credit for the nested loop, but without the patent BS. An idea so basic had to be discovered by someone sooner or later. If I were him I’d try to patent software self replication, it’s an idea whose usefulness goes far beyond virus. Especially in cloud computing.
Point he made is, antivirus companies are reacting to existing computer viruses, and variants of. They’re selling us aspirin, not antigens. Nobody is interested in modeling population health, models for infection, threshold of population infection in variance to mutated viruses.
#12
With the “cloud” of nowdays and the future, I don’t think software replication will be useful, all your important applications will be on your browser, a concept used on the ChromeOS.
I just hope it will not be that way until we have some kind of ubiquitous wireless connection to the internets everywhere.
Maybe the viruses of the future will just try to shut down servers or stealing millions of usernames and passwords at once, leaving intact the user PC.
Seeing his picture brings back so many fond memories… KILL HIM!!!
#14
Agreed, it might not be useful for software distribution. But as with all basic programming algorithms it’s usefulness isn’t limited to a single application.
I’m anxious to try the Chrome. Some how I get the feeling that it’s not as ‘online’ as once purported.
Viruses exist because they have a purpose. In the great majority of cases they try to enslave a machine to use it as an illegal spam distribution point, and enter straight through the browser. There’s nothing to be gained by shutting down a server or collecting usernames and passwords, unless that gives you access to credit card data or are involved in cyberwarfare or industrial espionage. In general servers are very well protected, it’s the average user that runs around with it’s pants down and picking daisys.
Anyways, they’d’ve never fixed HAL in ‘2010’ without a tapeworm virus.
The computer virus was invented by a Jew?
What a surprise…
“There are businesses that want to make sure they keep making money by having cures that fix the last one, but not the next one.”
Long ago, I stop subscribing to print magazines, like Pop. Electronics and various offering computer programs (in BASIC). Because I realized that they always had errors in whatever project they featured. And it took two or more issues to publish the corrections. As if the authors NEVER checked if the damn things worked, before going to print. Humbug! They knew. This had to be done on purpose. And the circuit projects always used at least one hard to find component. So unless you paid for the author’s kit, you could built squat!
All of which causes one to wonder about at least some of the errors that crop up in Windows code, and other applications. Requiring frequent fixes and patches, that also introduce more changes that people may not had liked in the beginning. Like Adobe sneaking in all the extra junk to their PDF reader.
i wonder how long it will take m$ to turn this around and claim they invented the computer virus! :))
The article says he wrote the first computer virus 26 years ago — 1983? I don’t think so!
From Wikipedia:
“The Creeper virus was first detected on ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet in the early 1970s. Creeper was an experimental self-replicating program written by Bob Thomas at BBN in 1971.”
What E-Tard? No way to connect this to Bush and his failures in office? Get OUT!
#1
He’s not the inventor of the first virus, he’s
the inventor of computer virus defense techniques.
A bit different?
#2
Does anyone here “spend a lot of money on anti-virus software”? Use free AVG ,
spybot S&D, and Adaware. Costs = $0
Better yet , but your hard drive on the shelf.
Boot off of a Linux ‘live cd’ that can run
100% in ram like Puppy Linux. Problem solved!
Most of us in the industry have known Cohen for years. There were several pre-cohen claimants for the title. (in 1971 there was a worm called CREEPER at BBN, for example) but Cohen gets the title, in my book.
What you are overlooking is that the only criteria that makes something a virus is that it replicates. (makes copies of itself)
Most of the viruses we ever tracked did only that and nothing more. The first Apple II virus was written by kids in Philadelphia, followed by Skrenta and Elk Cloner.
The first PC virus found in the wild was the Pakistani BRAIN virus written by Fasit and Amjad Faruq alvi in 1988.
None of those mentioned had any destructive action at all. Almost no viruses did anything destructive–but they got all the press. (if it bleeds it leads)
Except in the movies. In the movies viruses cause earthquakes, tip over oil tankers, open bank vault doors and so on. Movie viruses are magic, the modern deus ex machina.