Malware

(Notes are tak­en from the Try­HackMe course.)

• John von Neu­mann (!) cre­at­ed a con­cept of mali­cious soft­ware in 1949.
• The first imple­men­ta­tion was done in 1971 by Bob Thomas. The pro­gram Creep­er jumped from one sys­tem (run­ning the oper­at­ing sys­tem Tenex) to anoth­er and just print­ed a mes­sage on each console.
• The team Nema­tode is a term for mal­ware, which removes oth­er malware.
• The soft­ware Reaper was cre­at­ed by Tay Tom­lin­son in the mid-1970s which was a demon­stra­tion to share ressources over mul­ti­ple sys­tems. It per­formed a task (like remov­ing Creep­er) and prop­a­gat­ed itself to con­nect­ed systems.
• The first virus called The Wab­bit was cre­at­ed 1974 by Elmer Fudd. (The name is derived from rab­bit.) It is basi­cal­ly a fork bomb which crashed the system.
• The first tro­jan called ANIMAL was writ­ten 1975 by John Walk­er. It was a game for guess­ing ani­mals, but it has also a sub­rou­tine which copies itself in every oth­er direc­to­ry the user had access to.
• One of the first micro­com­put­er virus­es was Elk Clon­er, writ­ten 1982 by Richard Skrenta. It was a boot sec­tor virus. It copied itself to each disc a user added into the com­put­er. At the 50th start of the game Zig Zag, it showed a poem.
• The worm Mor­ris Inter­net Worm was cre­at­ed 1988 by Robert Tap­pan Mor­ris. It should expose secu­ri­ty vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties in aca­d­e­m­ic net­works, but failed to check if it was already installed, so the worm installed on many sys­tems mul­ti­ple times and per­formes a denial of ser­vice. It used a send­mail vulnerability.
• The mal­ware Cas­cade from around the mid-1980s was the first mal­ware which used encryp­tion to pre­vent detection.