History of early computer viruses. Part 2.

In the article "History of early computer viruses. Part 1." covered the history of computer viruses in 1989, continued today.

1990

This year brought several notable events. The first one was the appearance of the first polymorphic viruses "Chameleon" (a.k.a. "V2P1", "V2P2", and "V2P6"). Until then the anti-virus programs used "masks" - fragments of virus code - to look for viruses. After "Chameleon"'s appearance anti-virus program developers had to look for different methods of virus detection.

The second event was the appearance of Bulgarian "virus production factory": enormous amounts of new viruses were created in Bulgaria. Disease wears the entire families of viruses "Murphy", "Nomenclatura", "Beast" (or "512", "Number-of-Beast"), the modifications of the "Eddie" virus etc.

In July 1990 there was an incident with "PC Today" computer magazine (Great Britain). It contained a floppy disk infected with "DiskKiller" virus. More than 50,000 copies were sold.

In the second half of 1990 there appeared two Stealth monsters - "Frodo" and "Whale".

1991

Programmer Philip Zimmerman releases "Pretty Good Privacy" (PGP), a free, powerful data-encryption tool.

Symantec releases the Norton Anti-Virus software.

In April a full-scale epidemic broke out, caused by file and boot polymorphic virus called "Tequila", and in September the same kind of story happened with "Amoeba" virus.

Summer of 1991: "Dir_II" epidemic.

1992

Non-IBM PC and non-MS-DOS viruses are virtually forgotten: "holes" in global access network are closed, errors corrected, and network worm viruses lost the ability to spread themselves. File-, boot- and file-boot viruses for the most widely spread operating system (MS-DOS) on the most popular computer model (IBM PC) are becoming more and more important.

Early 1992: the first polymorphic generator MtE, serving as a base for several polymorphic viruses which follow almost immediately.

March 1992: "Michelangelo" virus epidemics (a.k.a. "March6") and the following hysteria took place.

July 1992: The first virus construction sets were made, VCL and PS-MPC.

Late 1992: The first Windows virus appears, infecting this OS's executables, and starts a new page in virus making.

1993

Virus makers are starting to do some serious damage: besides hundreds of mundane viruses which are no different than their counterparts, besides the whole polymorphic generators and construction sets, besides new electronic editions of virus makers there appear more and more viruses, using highly unusual ways of infecting files, introducing themselves into the system etc.

1994

The problem of CD viruses is getting more important. Having quickly gained popularity CD disks became one of the main means of spreading viruses.

Early in the year in Great Britain there popped out two extremely complicated polymorphic viruses, "SMEG.Pathogen" and "SMEG.Queeg".

Another wave of panic was created by a message about a supposed virus called "GoodTimes", spreading via the Internet and infecting a computer when receiving E-mail.

There appear some new unusual enough viruses:
January 1994: "Shifter" - the first virus infecting object modules (OBJ files). "Phantom1" - the cause of the first epidemic of polymorphic virus in Moscow.

April 1994: "SrcVir" - the virus family infecting program source code (C and Pascal).

June 1994: "OneHalf" - one of the most popular viruses in Russia so far starts a total epidemics.

September 1994: "3APA3A" - a boot-file virus epidemic. This virus uses a highly unusual way of incorporating into MS-DOS. No anti-virus was ready to meet such kind of a monster.

1995

Microsoft Corp. releases Windows 95. Anti-virus companies worry that the operating system will be resistant to viruses.

February 1995: an incident with Microsoft: Windows95 demos disks are infected by "Form".

Spring 1995: two anti-virus companies - ESaSS (ThunderBYTE anti-virus) and Norman Data Defense (Norman Virus Control) announce their alliance.

August 1995: one of the turning points in the history of viruses and anti-viruses: there has actually appeared the first "alive" virus for Microsoft Word ("Concept").