Happy Birthday…
Wow. It’s 25 years since the first virus was released into the wild. While the Elk Cloner wasn’t technically the first virus, it is generally accepted as such because it was the first to spread widely on personal computer which were starting to become popular and widespread.
I’m glad to say that in all the years I have been using computers, I have only ever had one virus attack my systems. I can’t recall which particular virus it was, but it was on the Amiga and managed to infect several of my floppies before I discovered it. At the time it was easiest to just ditch the infected disks, though I think there was some crude “cleansing” tool which supposedly could have fixed them. Apart from that one virus though, I have been able to avoid viruses thanks to common-sense guidelines and using a virus scanners where possible.
I have, however, seen some particularly nasty infections, some of the most persistent being MS Word macro viruses. I was working in IT support in the mid to late 90’s when macro viruses started to appear. One of the early macro viruses was somehow introduced into our network and turned out to be a very difficult thing to eradicate. While we could clean all infected files on the network and on our users’ PCs, if someone had emailed an infected document, the virus could lie dormant for quite some time before reappearing and reinfecting everything again. In those days virus scanners couldn’t scan and clean email attachments until they were opened, so the virus could lie in wait for months at a time until someone opened an old document in their email and there would be another round of scanning/cleaning files.
Over the years virus scanners and viruses have become more and more sophisticated. To think, it all started from a silly prank on an Apple II! 