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"Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner." ~Omar Bradley, Armistice Day Speech, 1948

The PC Revolution

In the early 1970s, computer manufacturers felt that the personal-use "microcomputer" market was too small to be profitable. Microprocessors were invented by Intel in 1971, but without hardware suppliers, computer enthusiasts had no way to put the chips to use. In 1974, Ed Roberts and his company, MITS, developed the first commercially-successful microcomputer, the Altair 8800, which was featured on the January 1975 cover of Popular Electronics magazine. The computer was sold as a kit for $397 (about $2,133 in 2022), and though it required significant technical knowledge (and did not ship pre-assembled), the kit sold thousands of orders in the first few weeks, sparking the first flames of the Personal Computer (PC) revolution.

The first mass-produced PCs came in 1977 with the release of the Apple II, Commodore's PET 2001 and Tandy's TRS-80, deemed the "1977 Trinity." With relatively simple programming languages and budget-friendly price-points, these systems significantly lowered the barrier to entry for computer technology. What had once been the purview of Governments, Corporations and Universities was now in the hands of a booming population of hobbyists, who turned their hobby into a booming new industry practically overnight.

In the 1980s, as Bill Gates envisioned "a computer on every desk and in every home," the ever-greater ubiquity of PCs led to a malware renaissance; what had once been simple experiments and pranks evolved into wide-spread, destructive attacks. Pandora's Box had been opened, and could not be closed again.

Elk Cloner and Brain

As with its predecessors, the first major PC malware was written as a prank, designed by 15-year-old Rich Skrenta in 1982. The malware, known as Elk Cloner, was the first "boot-sector virus" in history, spreading across Apple II systems by infecting the boot sectors of floppy disks. When users booted their systems using an infected disk, they would inadvertently launch the virus, which would then infect every subsequent disk inserted into the computer, marking each infected disk with a "signature" byte, so it wouldn't reinfect the disk a second time. As with ANIMAL, Elk Cloner was first distributed alongside game software.

Elk Cloner was incredibly contagious, spreading further than Skrenta ever imagined (or intended), largely due to users' ignorance regarding the threat of untrusted storage media. This is regarded the first large-scale computer virus outbreak in history. Recovery from the virus was somewhat difficult, as it required re-writing the boot sector of affected disks, often causing data loss. Innoculation was somewhat simpler, merely requiring a specific "signature" byte to be written to the disk. When Elk Cloner checked the disk to see whether it was infected, it would see the "signature" byte and skip the infection process.

Four years later, "Brain" (another boot-sector virus) became the first IBM PC virus, working in a similar fashion to Elk Cloner. Originally designed as an anti-piracy measure, Brain infected the boot sector of floppy disks, replacing the original data with a message intended to scare users of pirated software into contacting the developers and obtaining a legitimate copy. Brain's authors included their address and phone numbers, which were soon inundated with messages from angry users worldwide who wanted the virus removed from their systems. One writer's account cited reports that over 100,000 disks were infected worldwide. That's a lot of phone calls...

Agents of Chaos

In December of 1986, Ralf Burger—author of Computer Viruses: A High-Tech Disease—created Virdem, the first file-based virus for DOS. When executed, Virdem scans nearby directories for uninfected COM files, then infects each file found with a copy of itself. It overwrites the beginning of the .com file with a jump to the end, where it appends and passes control to a duplicate of its own code, before jumping back to the original code's entry point. This technique ensures the original code still runs unimpaired, but only after the virus spreads.

Virdem's official release included a guessing-game, played with the user while it infected their files. Like Brain, the virus included a message with the author's name and phone number. Ralf presented Virdem—with German and English translations—at the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) in Germany. His presentation inspired a host of variants, many of which omitted the guessing game entirely, or added other functionality. These variants continued evolving and spreading as late as 1993.

The Infection Spreads

1987 brought a host of new malware:

  • Vienna, which appeared and then was neutralized—a first for the IBM platform.
  • Lehigh, which infected command.com on DOS systems, stopped on-campus at its namesake university before it could spread "into the wild."
  • A barrage of boot-sector viruses: Yale from the US, Stoned from New Zealand, and Ping-Pong from Italy.
  • The first self-encrypting virus file, Cascade, which led IBM to develop its own antivirus products.

The pace continued in 1988:

  • Ping-Pong infected the University of Turin in Italy.
  • The Festering Hate viruses for Apple ProDOS spread throughout infected systems, then destroyed all files once they could no longer spread.
    • Festering Hate was based on CyberAIDS, about which "The Plague"—of Masters of Deception (MOD) fame—published an article in the Summer 1998 issue of 2600 Magazine.
    • In their article, The Plague referenced previously-unknown pseudonyms for other MOD members, including "Cereal Killer" and "Rancid Grapefruit."
    • Rafael Moreu's 1995 film, Hackers, nods to MOD by naming two characters after The Plague and Cereal Killer.
      • Fun Fact: This is every hacker's favorite movie, no matter how hard they deny it. Ask them. They'll deny it.
    • Not Fun Fact: Festering Hate was not the last file-destruction malware ever to be written.
  • The Morris Worm becomes the first worm to spread "in the wild," infecting BSD hosts across the Internet by exploiting buffer overflow vulnerabilities.
    • Its author, Robert Morris, launched the malware from MIT computer systems while he was a graduate student at Cornell.
    • He created the worm to see if it could be done, and launched it from MIT in the hopes that it would help his chances of studying there instead of Cornell.
    • Despite his benign intentions, Morris caused up to $10 million in damage.
    • He became the first felon convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986.
    • He received the following punishments for his crimes:
      • Three years' probation
      • 400 hours of community service
      • Just over $13,000 in fines
      • Becoming a tenured professor at MIT
      • Wealth, Fame and Success
    • Moral of the story: Crime doesn't pay. Except when it does.
  • In December, scientists in Switzerland sent a Christmas greeting to their friends at NASA in the form of the "Father Christmas" worm.
    • NASA was not amused.

In '89, malware authors kicked it up a notch:

  • Ghostball, the first known multipartite virus.
    • At a time when most viruses chose to infect either files or boot sectors, Ghostball asked: "¿Por qué no los dos?"
    • They took the best parts of Vienna and Ping-Pong and created a monster.
  • The AIDS Trojan became the first ransomware in history.
    • The trojan scrambled directory and filename structures, but didn't actually encrypt the files.
    • The ransom note requested users to send money to a P.O. box in Panama.
    • Its creator, Dr. Joseph Popp, intended to donate the proceeds to AIDS research.
    • Popp was detained in London, and later released to the United States.

Cyberpunk's Not Dead

The 80s was a warning, a shot across the digital bow, a bitter taste of things to come. It spoke to authors like William Gibson, Bruce Sterling and Bruce Bethke, mainstays of the Cyberpunk genre. Originally coined by Bethke, the word "Cyberpunk" became a banner beneath which artists expressed dire predictions about high-tech, dystopian futures. As Bill Gates espoused his vision for the future, the Cyberpunks asked:

"When computers are weapons, do we really want one on every desk and in every home?"