Exactly 35 years ago, the first computer virus began circulating on the Internet. It was written by XNUMX-year-old Cornell University student Robert T.appan Morris. The malicious software was named after its creator, the Morris worm. The author always defended himself by saying that he did not want to cause any harm with his program. His intention was to find out how many computers were connected to the Internet at a given moment.
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But the young man made a serious mistake while programming. The virus could have settled in the computer several times, which caused the computer systems to crash. Morris managed to install the virus on computers thanks to vulnerabilities in the Unix Sendmail program, the RSH/RExec protocol, Finger, and the use of weak passwords. The virus reached a total of 6 thousand devices. It was previously revealed that this act caused damage between 100 thousand and 10 million dollars. Morris nakonec was the defendant and became the first person ever to be charged in the United States with violating the Computer Freud Act. He walked away from the trial with three years of probation, 400 hours of community service, and a fine of $10. According to data, 050 computers were connected to the Internet at the time. Morris's virus was able to "infect" a tenth of them, which is unimaginable today. Robert TappBut Morris is officially the first person to create a computer virus, although many experts question his primacy.
The author is completely off the mark, the first computer virus was created already in 1971. Morris created the first computer worm on the Internet. Not even the first virus on the Internet. The worm is specific in that it spreads itself to other computers.
And of course the law is the Computer Fraud (and Abuse) Act and not Computer Freud.
How Miloslav Diviš opened it here. The first virus from 1971 was called Creeper, it spread over the Arpanet https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creeper and shortly after that, a single-purpose Reaper antivirus was created for it. It was not yet called a virus, this name was born only in 1983 and was defined in 1984. The first self-replicating program is from 1983. The first PC virus that did harm is from the beginning of 1986 from Pakistan. It could be said that the very first virus was created 52 years ago. The first self-propagating program was created 40 years ago. That Pakistani virus is celebrating its 37th anniversary.