Information Security: Looking Back, Looking Forward
Viruses, Worms, and Trojans, Oh my!
Not long ago, a young man set into motion a chain of events that have meant full employment ever since for various and sundry security practicioners. "On November 2, 1988, Robert Morris, Jr., a graduate student in Computer Science at Cornell, wrote an experimental, self-replicating, self-propagating program called a worm and injected it into the Internet. [1, 2]" Certainly, the worm was far more harmful than intended, as is frequently the case. In addition, the author did not expect to be recognized for his efforts. Instead, he gained infamy.
According to Hobbes Internet Timeline [1], the worm affected approximately six
thousand of the sixty thousand hosts that made up the
internet. In response to the worm, CERT
Early viruses were propagate through floppy disks. Common sense was usually enough to prevent an infection. There are multiple sources, each claiming a timeline for when viruses first appeared, but they didn't really become obvious to the general public until the advent of personal computers. CNet did an interesting story [3] in 2003, celebrating a twenty year anniversary of computer viruses. There were certainly virus and worm creations preceding this, but the advent of the personal computer was the the bellwether event.
Fred Cohen[4} is most frequently given credit for coining the term Virus, and he has written extensively on the subject. The term[5] had been used previously, in science fiction novels and film, but Fred Cohen is the first to have used it academically. Most of the colorful names and descriptions, however, seem to have come from an article[6] that appeared in Scientific American in May, 1984, entitled Core Wars.
Bulletin Boards, X.25, ANS
In earlier days, the Internet was available to small segments of society. It was (for a time) comprised of various universites, research institutions, the amorphous ARPA/DARPA/ARPA combination, and various military organizations (now known to us all as .mil). Of course, the lack of a cohesive structure didn't stop various pockets of interesting and like-minded groups of poeple from forming their own little microcosms.