Brain Computer Virus
The Brain computer virus one of the earliest PC-based computer virus that was detected on Jan 1986, but the self-propagating program was not the first computer virus. Two Pakistani brothers, Amjad and Basit Farooq Alvi, created the Brain virus to infect IBM PCs. The program may have been the first attempt at "viral" marketing: An infected machine would flash a message on the screen, advertising the company Brain Computer Services of Lahore, Pakistan.
Two unknown brothers, Amjad and Basit, from "Chahmiran" a lower middle class area of Lahore shot to prominence as a brief message started to flash across thousand of computer screens in the USA. "Welcome to the Dungeon (c) 1986 Basit * Amjad (pvt) Ltd. BRAIN COMPUTER SERVICES 730 NIZAM BLOCK ALLAMA IQBAL TOWN LAHORE-PAKISTAN PHONE: 430791,443248,280530. Beware of this VIRUS. Contact us for vaccination." In no time at all, corporate America was in a fix. Unsure of what the message meant, or what its implications could be, American computer users panicked and the tiny 3.5 kilobyte virus was immediately dubbed as the first alien assault on American computer culture. The fact was, Amjad, a computer science graduate had developed software which would then be marketed by the company. The brothers also had a shady bootlegging sideline: they would copy commercial software created by other companies and sell it at a reduced price. Ironically, they soon discovered that its own original products were being pirated, which was costing them a great deal of revenue. Infuriated, Amjad came up with a form of technological blackmail: he wrote a hidden program to be included with all future products, which would have destructive effects and would lurk in a computer's RAM, copying itself to any disks used by that machine. Users would then have to pay them to remove the virus.
The first general personal computer virus was the Elk Cloner program for the Apple II created by Rick Skrenta, now the co-founder and CEO of Topix.net, in 1982. The program would infect Apple II disks and display a poem every fifth time the program ran.
The first possible computer virus is an UNIVAC program that acted as a carrier for a variant of the Animal game. The virus, though it was not called such, was dubbed PERVADE by its author, John Walker. A network administrator in the 1970s, Walker created the program to help him deal with all the requests for his variant of the ANIMAL program, a game where the computer would try to guess the animal the user was thinking about by asking yes-or-no questions. Other administrators would send him tapes on which he could copy the ANIMAL program. After mailing several tapes to interested people, Walker decided to create a program to distribute the game automatically. Whenever ANIMAL would run, the PERVADE program would look for writable directories on computer and copy itself to the directory. Within a few weeks, administrators at other companies started reporting the program on their systems. Walker went on to found AutoDesk in the 1980s, the company that behind the famous AutoCAD software.
Updated On: 06.01.24