22/03/2024
Today we will be talking about The History of Cybersecurity:
A computer virus is malicious code written to interfere with computer operations and cause damage to data and software. The virus attaches itself to programs or documents on a computer, then spreads and infects one or more computers in a network. Today, viruses are more commonly referred to as malware, which is software designed to harm devices or networks. Two examples of early malware attacks that we'll cover are the Brain virus and the Morris worm.
In 1986, the Alvi brothers created the Brain virus, although the intention of the virus was to track illegal copies of medical software and prevent pirated licenses, what the virus actually did was unexpected. Once a person used a pirated copy of the software, the virus infects that computer.
In 1988, Robert Morris developed a program to assess the size of the internet. The program crawled the web and installed itself onto other computers to tally the number of computers that were connected to the internet. Sounds simple, right? The program, however, failed to keep track of the computers it had already compromised and continued to re-install itself until the computers ran out of memory and crashed. About 6,000 computers were affected, representing 10% of the internet at the time.
After the Morris worm, Computer Emergency Response Teams, known as CERTs®, were established to respond to computer security incidents. CERTs still exist today but as computer security incident response teams (CSIRTs) , but their place in the security industry has expanded to include more responsibilities.