March 19, 2004: The Witty worm is a record-breaking worm in many regards. It exploited holes in several IBM Internet Security Systems products. It was the first worm to take advantage of vulnerabilities in the very pieces of software designed to enhance network security, and carried a destructive payload, unlike previous worms and it spread […]

On February 18, 2016, the Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center paid a $17,000 ransom in the form of bitcoins for the decryption key for patient data. The Hospital was infected by ransomware Locky, it was the delivery of an email attachment disguised as a Microsoft Word invoice that contained malicious macros. This has led to increased […]

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.

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]