Welcome to History, this page will be talking about what was the first malware, what were the largest malware attacks & what was used to stop it long ago.
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The First Malware, known as "Creeper" (not the one from Minecraft) appeared in the early 1970s. It was a self-replicating program that displayed a text reading, "I'm the Creeper: Catch me if you can!" It wasn't harmful but was made to test spreading across connected systems. The virus was eventually followed by a program called "Reaper" designed to remove it.
7 years later, the first trojan was made. Known as "ANIMAL", It was another harmless virus that didn't do any real harm to the computers it infected. It did give the users who were using the infected networks a Guessing Game as it continued to spread among connected networks
in 1981, a malware known as the "Elk Cloner" was made to infect Apple II computers (really old early macbooks), This Malware would spread in floppy disks & again display a taunting poem.
Earlier, people didn't actually call these programs "Viruses" until now.
Viruses now began to spread for IBM-PC Computers.
The Jerusalem virus was a malware that actually did damage, aswell as doing damage every Friday the 13th, making it one of the first viruses that appear repeatedly since.
The Morris Worm was created on the year 1988, it was a worm that found its way into the Internet and was able to spread rapidly to networks. Making it the first ever virus to get outside local networks.
The Michelangelo Worm had threats of destroying systems but did little to no damange on infected machines, Although it did bring a lot of media attention.
Malware & Computer Viruses began to become more advanced before the 2000s, Viruses such as Happy99, Melissa Worm & KAK worm spread quickly in Microsoft enviroments used by many Internet users.
The Infamous "ILOVEYOU" worm was made & it infects millions of Windows machines within hours of being released.
One of the first DDoS attacks was used again Yahoo.com, The best search engine at the time.
The Nimba Worm was made that infected a few computers, using old vulnerabilities and backdoor entrances created by older worms
Santy spreads through phpBB and uses Google to find targets.
The Republic of Estonia was hit with DDoS attacks, crashing goverment, school & banks' websites
one of the powerful & popular malware ever created at the time, infected around 10.0M Microsoft server systems, including government and military machines. The media attention garnered by Conficker helps further raise the idea of network security in the public consciousness.
There were "Scareware" programs that pretended to be an antivirus but it's malware itself, they would pretend there's a serious virus on their PC but it leads them to download more malware.
a form of Trojan that targetted Iranian nuclear facilities. Although it doesn't attack any real users it is considered to be the most advanced form of malware.
A popular shoe ecommerce site known as "Zappos" had a data breach that caused over 24.0M data to be leaked, that data contained things like Full Names, Email Addresses and Credit Card numbers.