Archives - History of Antivirus

On this day in history – Happy99 worm appears spreading through email and usenet

January 20, 1999: The Happy99 worm first appeared. It invisibly attaches itself to emails, displays fireworks to hide the changes being made, and wishes the user a happy New Year. It modifies system files related to Outlook Express and Internet Explorer (IE) on Windows 95 and Windows 98.

On this day in history – Santy worm uses Google to spread across the Internet

December 20, 2008: Within 24 hours of its release, about 30,000 to 40,000 websites were attacked by Santy. The worm, which exploited vulnerability in phpBB software, holds a record of spreading worldwide within three hours of its release. It caused writable files (of formats such as .php and .html) on the infected servers to display […]

The term ‘virus’ is coined by Frederick Cohen

In November 1983 he used “virus” to describe self-replicating computer programs. In 1984 Cohen uses the phrase “computer virus” – as suggested by his teacher Leonard Adleman – to describe the operation of such programs in terms of “infection”. He defines a “virus” as “a program that can ‘infect’ other programs by modifying them to […]

On this day in history – The Conficker computer Worm infects Microsoft systems

November 21, 2008: Computer worm Conficker infects anywhere from 9 to 15 million Microsoft server systems running everything from Windows 2000 to the Windows 7 Beta. The French Navy, UK Ministry of Defence (including Royal Navy warships and submarines), Sheffield Hospital network, German Bundeswehr and Norwegian Police were all affected. Microsoft sets a bounty of […]

Early Antivirus solutions

In 1987 appearance of Lehigh virus (discovered at its namesake university), boot sector viruses such as Yale from USA, Stoned from New Zealand, Ping Pong from Italy, and appearance of first self-encrypting file virus, Cascade. Lehigh was stopped on campus before it spread to the wild, and has never been found elsewhere as a result. […]

On this day in history – backdoor trojan Bitfrost infects Windows

October 12, 2004: Bifrost is a backdoor trojan horse family of more than 10 variants which can infect Windows 95 through Windows 10 (although on modern Windows systems, after Windows XP, its functionality is limited). Bifrost uses the typical server, server builder, and client backdoor program configuration to allow a remote attacker, who uses the […]