Several thousand floppy disks containing the AIDS Trojan, the first known ransomware, are mailed to subscribers of PC Business World magazine and a WHO AIDS conference mailing list. This DOS Trojan lies dormant for 90 boot cycles, then encrypts all filenames on the system, displaying a notice asking for $189 to be sent to a […]

August 11, 2003: Blaster Worm (also known as Lovsan, Lovesan or MSBlast) is a computer worm that spread on computers running operating systems Windows XP and Windows 2000, during August 2003. The worm was first noticed and started spreading on August 11, 2003. The rate that it spread increased until the number of infections peaked […]

July 31, 2008: Koobface is a network worm that attacks Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux platforms. This worm originally targeted users of networking websites like Facebook, Skype, Yahoo Messenger, and email websites such as GMail, Yahoo Mail, and AOL Mail. Technical support scammers also fraudulently claim to their intended victims that they have […]

July 13, 2001: Code Red was a computer worm observed on the Internet. It attacked computers running Microsoft’s IIS web server. The Code Red worm was first discovered and researched by eEye Digital Security employees Marc Maiffret and Ryan Permeh, the Code Red worm exploited a vulnerability discovered by Riley Hassell. They named it “Code […]

June 15, 2004: Caribe or Cabir is a computer worm that is designed to infect mobile phones that run Symbian OS. It is the first computer worm that can infect mobile phones. When a phone is infected with Cabir, the message “Caribe” is displayed on the phone’s display, and is displayed every time the phone […]

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 […]