Creeper; 50 Years of Virus in the Network
Creeper; 50 Years of Virus in the Network
"I'm the Creeper, catch me if you can!" the quote that meant the beginning of IT viruses
A day like any other day, on 2nd Novemebr but of 1971, Creeper came to life, the first IT virus in history (although the "virus" concept would not be granted until the 80s). It was surprising when all of a sudden, the following message appeared in several computers from ARPANET: “I'm the creeper, catch me if you can!”. That was the first time something like that was seen and nobody was sure about its source it came from, they only detected it was a program that replicated itself and was spread in network nodes.
In 1949, mathematician John von Neumann, predicted the existence of IT viruses and worms, which was actually autoreplicating programs. But it wasn't until 1971, with the creation of Creeper when the firt of those programs came to light.
Creeper was produced by Bob Thomas Morris, a professor at MIT that worked for BBN Technologies in Massachusetts, a company other geniuses such as Ray Tomlinson, Robert Kahn or JCR Licklider came from. Thomas developped Creeper as an experimental autoreplicable program with the objective of going from one computer to another. "Creeper is a demo program that can migrate from one computer to another within the ARPA network while it carries out its simple task" Thomas himself explained.
A virus… and its antivirus
Although it lacked a malicious nature, it meant a whole challenge for IT technicians at the time, who had before them a fast and elusive piece of software, a "worm". This lead them to do their research and create the "antivirus" for the "virus": Reaper, referring to the meaning of "Creeper", since you need a reaper to wipe out the Creeper.
This time, it was Ray Tomlinson, father of the email, who lead the antivirus project, whose purpose and goal was deleting Creeper from the computers it was hosted in.
"Creeper is a demo program that can migrate from one computer to another within the network ARPA while it carries out its simple task" explained Thomas himself.
Evil starts spreading
A few years later, in 1974, Rabbit appeared, who, following the example of Crreper, would reproduce itself in foreign computers, but this time it did have a malicious nature since it copied itself non-stop, until it obstructed the system and blocked it. Evil's era in the Internet started being barely glimpsed.
In 1981, Elk Cloner was created, a virus that installed itself through an infected floppy disk and monitored disk accesses to infect booting sectors from others that were inserted to jump from a computer to another, mainly Apple II computers. Although it was a virus that could be deleted from the system memory by just restarting the computer, low user training on the matter made it possible for it to expand noticeably.
In 1986, it was the turn for IBM machines, when Brain came into play, a virus that infected operating system booting sectors in order to monitor the software. In addition, it warned owners that the machine had been infected and provided contact information to get the "cure."
Evil has evolved over the network to a point over the years where now it is impossible to navigate without having a good antivirus software, either for personal or business use.
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