20th birthday of the first computer virus!

The vast majority of computer users today probably do not know that last January 19 is the 20th anniversary of the world's first computer virus.

On January 19, security company F-Secure conducted a small 'birthday' ceremony for the world's first computer virus called Brain.A. It is unclear before Brain.A was born that a computer virus was born before or not, but currently Brain.A is considered the first virus capable of spreading via floppy disk was caught correctly. 20 years. Brain.A is considered a dangerous virus at that time because it has the ability to disable the boot sector of boot floppy or hard disk.

F-Secure said that Brain.A was the first virus to officially open the "malicious era" that lasts until today and will only end when there is no longer any . any computer There were a lot of specialized viruses attacking the boot sector of the hard disk or floppy disk after Brain.A's child appeared. The age of the boot sector viruses that lasted from 1986 to 1995 has been reduced to make room for newer viruses, specializing in Windows attacks and potentially spreading across the Internet.

After Brain.A was born two years ago, the first network worm named Morris Worm appeared and specialized in attacking Unix systems connected to the Internet.

Until now, computer viruses have caused too much damage to the human world. On January 19, the FBI announced that the total amount of damages that computer criminals had caused to US businesses in 2005 amounted to $ 67.2 billion, with viruses and network worms being attacks. public is most favored by digital gangsters.

In the last 20 years, about 150,000 viruses have been discovered and identified, the number of viruses is currently increasing at a rate of galloping that is virtually impossible to prevent. Most of the viruses created in recent times are capable of stealing financial information in order to profit for the creator, completely different from the style of creating viruses to make fun or to assert themselves. I was 10 years ago.

In addition to opening up an era of malicious code, Brain.A also gave birth to the security industry with a total turnover of over 4 billion USD this year and will reach 7.3 billion USD in 2009.

HOANG KIM ANH