9 Interesting Internet Virii and one ARPANET Virus

1. The Creeper

The Creeper virus was first detected on ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet in the early 1970s. It propagated via the Tanex operating system and could make use of any connect modem to dial out to remote computers and infect them. It would display the message “I’M THE CREEPER : CATCH ME IF YOU CAN.”. It is rumored that the Reaper program that appeared shortly after and sought out copies of the Creeper and deleted them, may have been written by the creator of the Creeper in a fit of regret.

2. Elk Cloner

The first virus to circulate outside of a singular network was called Elk Cloner, and was created and distributed on an Apple II computer, 25 years ago, in 1982.

It was created by a 15-year-old called Richard Skrenta. It didn’t do any damage, it just displayed the following message:

Elk Cloner: The program with a personality
It will get on all your disks
It will infiltrate your chips

Yes it’s Cloner!
It will stick to you like glue
It will modify RAM too
Send in the Cloner!

You can see why he was a hacker and not a poet.

3. BRAIN aka Pakistani Flu

“Brain” is the first virus to hit computers running a Microsoft Corp. operating system — DOS. Written by two Pakistani brothers, the virus was distributed with software packages and would count the number of times the software was accessed or how many times the system was booted while the software was installed. It would then lock the user out of their computer if they went over the limit. To unlock, users would need to phone the company to retrieve a license. Amazingly, the phone number and address of their computer repair shop were included and the two brothers were quickly taken to court.

4. MORRIS

Written by a Cornell University graduate student whose father was then a top government computer-security expert, the virus infected an estimated 6,000 university and military computers connected over the Internet. Although viruses had spread over the Internet before, until “Morris” none was widespread.

5. MELISSA

“Melissa” was one of the first viruses to spread via e-mail. When users opened an attachment, the virus sent copies of itself to the first 50 people in the user’s address book, covering the globe within hours.

6. LOVE BUG

The Love Bug Also spread via e-mail attachment, it exploited human nature and tricked recipients into opening it by disguising itself as a love letter. The worm, first discovered in Hong Kong, first arrived in e-mail boxes on May 4, 2000 with the simple subject of “ILOVEYOU” with an attachment “LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs”. Upon running, LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs would send itself to all entries in the victims mailbox. As such it was often seen as safe and could be sent out thousands of times in a matter of minutes.

The LOVE BUG virus spread throughout the entire world in less than a day. Damage is estimated to have cost approximately 5.5 billion dollars. The Pentagon, CIA, and the British Parliament all had to shut down their E-mail systems to get rid of the worm as did most large corporations.

7. Code Red

Exploiting a flaw in Microsoft software, Code Red was among the first network worms to spread rapidly because it required only a network connection, not a human opening an attachment. Although the flaw was known, many system operators had yet to install a software patch Microsoft made available a month earlier to fix it.

Code red would deface the affected website to display “HELLO! Welcome to http://www.worm.com! Hacked By Chinese!”. It would then attempt to spread itself to more IIS servers on the internet. Finally, after laying dormant for 20-27 days it would launch a DoS attack on several fixed IP addresses. The IP of the White House web server being one. Although the worm had been released on July 13, the largest group of infected computers was seen on July 19, 2001. On this day, the infected hosts reached 359,000.

7. Blaster

Blaster also took advantage of a known flaw in Microsoft software and, along with the 2003 “SoBig” outbreak, prompted Microsoft to offer cash rewards to people who help authorities capture and prosecute the virus writers.

8. Sasser

Sasser exploited a Microsoft flaw as well and prompted some computers to continually crash and reboot, apparently the result of bad programming. Although Sasser is hardly the last malicious software, the ones since then have generally received less attention as networks install better defenses and profit-minded virus writers try to avoid detection and removal of their works. Multiple versions of Sasser persist to this day.

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