Archives - History of Antivirus


On this day in history – Code Red worm attacks Microsoft web servers

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 […]

On this day in history – the first computer worm to infect mobile phones

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 […]

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 […]