There are two priorities for businesses when choosing IT services and installations: functionality and security.
The hardware and software installed in a new office needs to be fit for purpose, appropriate and cost-effective, compatible with the software needed to keep the business running and tailored to individual needs and requirements.
However, computer security is also a massive priority, particularly as the potential consequences of security breaches are much more severe now than at any other point in history. If they involve personal data, it can involve massive fines.
Despite this, it should be noted that for as long as networked computers have been used for security purposes, security has been a consideration and a concern, and a few notable albeit innocuous computer virus infections have shaped the IT security world ever since.
Creeper And Reaper
The first virus and first anti-virus ever made, respectively, Creeper and Reaper were made in 1971 and 1972 primarily to test the principle of developing self-replicating computer programs.
Technically Creeper (and Reaper, despite being described as an anti-virus tool) was a computer worm that spread through a computer network, although both were deployed with permission across the 28 computers running TENEX on ARPANET at the time.
The only impact it had was to display a message on the system declaring that it was The Creeper and a taunt to “Catch me if you can!” Beyond the processing it took to display the message, it had no other impact.
Regardless, it did show that computer viruses and worms were possible to make and that as computers became more connected, both the positives and negatives of that connection need to be considered.
Rabbit
Rabbit, sometimes known as “wabbit”, was the first virus or hack that caused damage to a computer, although it was a completely unintended consequence.
Using a process known as a fork bomb, Rabbit and other similar rabbit viruses replicate a program or system process infinitely until the computer runs out of system resources and crashes.
Depending on if the RABBITS hack from 1969 counts, it was the first virus using a modern definition to cause damage to a system, earlier than a disk space stealing program from 1971. Some sources claim the rabbit bomb was invented in 1974, however.
Regardless of timing, it was the first virus to make people think about the potential malware had to damage computers and hamper productivity.
Animal
Another example of an innocuous program with unintended consequences, 1975’s ANIMAL was the first ever Trojan virus, where the self-replicating part disguises itself as a normal and otherwise harmless game.
Animal, invented by John Walker of AutoCAD fame, was meant to be a simple guessing game akin to the parlour game 20 Questions where the program would ask questions to guess the animal a user was thinking of.
It then spread and copied itself using the PERVADE to every directory the user had access to, although unlike later viruses it would be careful not to try copying itself anywhere it did not have access to or would cause harm to existing files.
Elk Cloner
The first large-scale virus outbreak in history, Elk Cloner was created in 1982 by 15-year-old Rich Skrenta as a joke, but it quickly got out of hand.
It was the first boot sector virus, which became the norm for computer viruses for over a decade, displaying a taunting poem and causing computers to behave weirdly every five times the particular disk was run.
Because it was not meant to do much deliberate harm, it was designed to only run once, adding a signature byte to the disk’s directory to tell the virus not to activate again, even once the disk was cleaned of the virus. This was eventually used to “inoculate” disks against the virus.
It worked perhaps too well; many of the people Mr Skrenta knew were upset with him, and his maths teacher even accused him of breaking into his office.
Brain
If Elk Cloner was responsible for the first computer virus outbreak, then Brain was responsible for the first epidemic. It was so widespread that it inspired the first commercial computer security businesses and antivirus programs.
It was originally created by Amjad Farooq Alvi of Lahore, Pakistan, in order to stop medical software from being copied illegally, although outside of making a few kilobytes unreadable and slowing down a floppy disk drive it was not designed to cause any harm.
It contained their phone numbers and the address of their computer store, which was promptly bombarded with angry calls from around the world.
This would inspire a computer engineer named John McAfee to develop tools to remove Brain and create the modern IT security market in the process.