Archives - History of Antivirus


The first IBM PC compatible “in the wild” computer virus

One of the first real widespread infections, was “Brain” in 1986. From then, the number of viruses has grown exponentially. Most of the computer viruses written in the early and mid-1980s were limited to self-reproduction and had no specific damage routine built into the code. That changed when more and more programmers became acquainted with […]

On this day in history – one of the most damaging worms ever appeared

May 5, 2000: The ILOVEYOU worm, also known as Love Letter, or VBS, or Love Bug worm, is a computer worm purportedly created by a Filipino computer science student. Written in VBScript, it infected millions of Windows computers worldwide within a few hours of its release. Using social engineering techniques, it is considered to be […]

The first known computer virus appeared in 1971

“Theory of self-reproducing automata”, the first known computer virus appeared in 1971 and was dubbed the “Creeper virus”. This computer virus infected Digital Equipment Corporation’s (DEC) PDP-10 mainframe computers running the TENEX operating system. The Creeper virus was eventually deleted with a program known as “The Reaper” created by Ray Tomlinson. Some people consider “The […]