Travelling back to the early days of the Computer Virus entering the world of low cost, COTS (Commercial Off the Shelf) available computing, we may reflect on a few home truths as we proceed down the Road to Digital Perdition. Circa 1983 when Fred Cohen, a graduate student out of the University of Southern California presented his thoughts of the digital future of potential adversity, by demonstrating a computer virus during a security seminar at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. See Fig 1. I recall that event very well, as it was not long after when the Sunday Times ran a small piece hidden in a corner of the paper on this discovery. Sadly however, at that time neither GCHQ or CESG considered this new digital phenomenon to be a risk worth breaking a sweat over – in fact their own words of the day were ‘We consider the computer virus to be a passing nuisance’. Shortly after 1984, we started to see the manifestation of computer viruses in the form of File and Boot Sector viruses start to impact computers far and wide across the Globe.
Fig 1 – Fred Cohen’s Evolutionary Virus
Those early day viruses appeared in many forms, Brain, Casino, Cascade, and many more – at Fig 2 is my early library of all the computer viruses I collected in that period of learning – all of which were taking their toll on those who were supporting corporate computer assets, and fighting off this new digital evil (or in the worlds of GCHQ – nuisance).
Fig 2 – Early Days Virus Library
One of the next notable events from these early heady days of the Computer Virus was the publication of ‘Computer Viruses – a High Tech Disease’, authored by Ralf Burger, with its second edition being released in 1988 (See Fig 3 below).
