The main feature of computer viruses is not their sabotage in itself, but the ability to reproduce itself. Such programs first appeared in the sixties, long before the advent of personal computers.
First viruses
The first computer viruses were completely unlike modern pests - they were ordinary harmless programs, albeit very self-willed. They worked in the system, did some things they knew, and did not obey the administrators of computer systems at all. However, for the time being, the harmlessness of these "viruses" allowed them not to attract special attention to themselves.
Everything changed on April 19, 1972, when the computers that were part of the Airpanet network were shut down in the United States. This stopped many computerized processes and disrupted traffic lights, causing a huge number of car accidents, resulting in losses amounting to millions of dollars.
All this was conceived as an ordinary joke - the malicious program was written by one of the students of an American university, whose name is unknown. He was only trying to surprise his colleagues by creating a program that would replicate and travel over computer networks. The prank was clearly a "success", but the creator of this virus could hardly have imagined the scale of the destruction that his brainchild would cause.
Fred Cohen is the official creator of the first virus
Officially, the creator of the first virus is considered to be a student from California, Fred Cohen, who wrote it in 1983 as part of his thesis on computer security. He provided this program for review to his teacher, Leonard Adleman, who, according to some sources, was the first to use the term "computer virus".
Despite the fact that Cohen's virus did not do any harm, experts had no doubts about the consequences of the mass creation of such programs. Fred Cohen understood this too, proposing in 1984 to create the first antivirus program, and a few years later, in 1987, he proved that it was impossible to create an algorithm that would protect against absolutely all viruses.
It was at this time that the first viral epidemic struck the computer world. Over the past three years, more than one hundred thousand machines have been infected, and computer networks around the world have been out of order for several days or more, endangering the reliability of computers and undermining people's confidence in the safety of their use.
True, the creators of antiviruses also did not doze, gradually gaining strength and repelling attacks by hackers more and more successfully. This battle continues to this day, and Fred Cohen remains one of the best specialists in the field of computer viruses today.
