14 DAY TRIAL // The first computer virus was written before some of you were even born. Since then, about 25 years have passed and the virus "market" has changed a lot. At the beginning there were just "Hey, look how cool I am" viruses. They weren't the type of malware that would screw up your PC, they were somewhat harmless. All they were doing was promoting a certain message or prompting you from time to time with the creator's screen name or something like "You've been hacked by HaxXx0r!" or stuff like that.
That was at the beginning, but then, they escalated, from non-threatening to viruses that can make your computer crash and do all sort of nasty things to it. But then, hackers decided that they no longer want to be famous, or to crash your computer, but to steal your money, that's why a wide range of Trojans and worms appeared. The worse threats I've seen lately were PRG (the Trojan that hit Monster) and Storm - these viruses won't do much to your PC, but they will certainly steal a lot of personal data. And to be frank, getting your data stolen and losing money due to that is a lot worse than having to format your computer.
Now, in 2004 we had Sasses that jumped the lssas process of Windows. It prompted you that your computer is going to reboot in 59 seconds...and ticking. That could be solved by installing SP2, but the immediate solution was to go to Start>Run>CMD>"shutdown -a" and no more reboot. It had quite a huge spread, as I remember it. At the same time Hydrag (or Jeefo) was a trendy virus as well - it infected all your .exe files which was very unpleasant.
In 2003 we had the Blaster. Some know it as ms_blaster. It kicked Windows' a*s and made fun of one of its vulnerabilities. But the really cool one was Code Red, back in 2001; now this was a huge hit to network admins. At that time, no one had ever seen network worms before, as any worm it spread really fast infected a lot of files, and the thing is, it didn't need Internet connection, it just infected anything on the network.
And in 2000, we had the Love Bug, some know it as the Sexy Bug but it's the same thing. That seemed just a harmless virus at that time, you would get it from mail attachments. How could have anybody known that the Love Bug would lead to something like PRG?
In 1999 there was Melissa, and boy, did that virus spread fast! You'd get it from an e-mail and then it sent itself to more users in your list that would get it as well from that e-mail, and so on and so forth. At that time, if you didn't have that virus, you were considered uncool! (just joking)
In '88 there was Morris - nothing too special about this one, except for the fact that it was the first virus widely spread. And in '86 we had Brain - this one was harmless, just prompting you from time to time with the phone number of a computer repair shop, but just think what the hackers have missed out in that year. It was the year of Chernobyl and if it had happened today, boy would we have received a lot of spam, through which we would have been persuaded to donate for the victims, and of course, the money would go to the spammers' account. Good thing they didn't know too much about spam and botnets back then...
And here comes my personal favorite - probably the first virus ever, the all mighty Elk Cloner. It did nothing much, but it prompted users with a poem that went something like this: "Elk Cloner: The program with a personality/ It will get on all your disks/ It will infiltrate your chips/ Yes it's Cloner!/It will stick to you like glue/ It will modify RAM too/ Send in the Cloner!" It was written by a 15 year old to affect Apple II machine, so what did you expect? So, things went from an annoying little virus to threats that will help hackers get their hands on your dough. I wonder where we'll be after 25 more years...