Celebrated annually on November 3,
Antimalware Day is an opportunity to recognize the work of cybersecurity
professionals
Since 2017, November 3 has been celebrated as
Antimalware Day. Established by ESET, Antimalware Day aims to honor the work
done by researchers in the field of information security and in the technology
industry as a whole. As ours is an era in which technology plays a crucial role
and is found in almost everything that surrounds us, this special date is also
intended to highlight the importance of protecting users from cyberthreats and
increasing their awareness of dangers on the Internet.
As part of our celebration of Antimalware
Day, we will review how the concept of a computer virus came into being,
examine the first active threat and the first antivirus software, as well as
look back at some of the most important cybersecurity threats of the past four
decades.
How Antimalware Day came to be
November 3 was declared as Antimalware Day in
order to honor the work of those who coined the term “computer virus” and laid the groundwork for
research into computer threats. They are Frederick Cohen, then a graduate
student in Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC) who
created self-replicating code on November 3, 1983, and his Ph.D.
advisor, Professor Leonard Adleman, who decided to baptize that code as a
computer virus. As part of their work, Cohen wrote a paper in 1984 that was
called “Computer Viruses – Theory and Experiments”. It became the first
research paper to use the term “computer virus”.
Although others had performed tests and
developed malicious programs even before Adleman and Cohen came up with the
term, there was no way at the time to know that others were engaging in
experiments of this kind, as Adleman said in an interview for WeLiveSecurity.
At any rate, one of the first active
malicious programs that began to be used outside the laboratory or the computer
on which it was created was called “Elk Cloner” and it was the work of Rich
Skrenta in 1982. According to an article
published by NBC News, many think that this was the first real
computer virus, since it spread to several home computers at the time. “Elk
Cloner” was followed in 1986 by “Brain”, the first virus to infect IBM PCs.
Brain infected the boot sector of a floppy disk, which allowed it to propagate
and reach several parts of the world within a few weeks. In addition, it was
the first computer virus that used stealth techniques.
How malware and cybersecurity came to be
Naturally, all this activity resulted in the
need for protective measures, which led to the emergence of a cybersecurity
industry that aimed to develop solutions safeguarding computer users from
threats. Even though it isn’t certain which antivirus software was the very
first in history, it is a German company called G Data Software that is
credited with developing the first antivirus solution in 1987 – a program for
the Atari ST
line of home computers. Indeed, also in 1987: the first virus discovered by
Peter Paško and Miroslav Trnka, dubbed Vienna, led to the development of the
NOD32 antivirus program; Paško and Trnka later became the co-founders of ESET.
Ever since, malware and the cybersecurity
industry have never stopped evolving. Over the years, there have been threats
that had lasting effects and marked an era, such as the Morris worm in the late
1980s, Michelangelo in the 1990s, LoveLetter (aka ILoveYou) in 2000, and all
the way until the present day with other infamous threats, including
WannaCryptor aka WannaCry.
Over the course of this month, the
WeLiveSecurity team will take advantage of Antimalware Day and International
Security Day (observed annually on November 30) to publish one article each
Monday in November in which we will explore some of the most notorious computer
threats of the past four decades.