VIRUS: Vital Information Resources Under Seize
The full form of VIRUS is “Vital Information Resources Under Seize“. This virus is different from the biological virus. Basically it is a code or a computer program that can load your computer by itself. It affects the computer without the user’s knowledge. Like biological viruses, this virus also has the ability to replicate itself and affect the entire system. Computer viruses cause damage to billions of dollars every year due to system failures, wasted computer resources, data corruption, increased maintenance costs or theft of personal information. This article is not only about the full form of virus, but much more than that.
Viruses are man-made programs that generally write to access private information, corrupt data, to show humorous and political messages on the user’s screen. They are integrated into host programs and spread when infected programs are run. It has the ability to affect data files, hard drive, computer speed and more after replication is successful. One of the most likely systems is the systems that run on Windows OS. To combat viruses, programmers created antivirus programs. Modern antivirus software can protect users from malicious browser help objects (BHOs), browser hijackers, ransomware, keyloggers, backdoors, rootkits, Trojans, worms, malicious LSPs, fraud tools, adware, and spyware.
History
- In the early 1970s, The Creeper virus was the first virus detected in ARPANET, the precursor of the Internet. Creeper was an experimental program for automatic replication, written by Bob Thomas in BBN Technologies in 1971.
- In 1982, a program called “Elk Cloner” was the first personal computer virus to appear “in the wild”, that is, outside the single computer or computer lab where it was created.
- In 1984, Fred Cohen of the University of Southern California wrote his article “Computer viruses: theory and experiments.” It was the first article to explicitly call a self-replicating program “virus”, a term introduced by Cohen’s mentor, Leonard Adleman.
- The first IBM PC virus “in the wild” was a boot sector virus called c) Brain, created in 1986 by the Farooq Alvi Brothers in Lahore, Pakistan.
- WinVir, the first virus specifically targeting Microsoft Windows, was discovered in April 1992, two years after the release of Windows 3.0.
- In February 1996, the Australian hackers of the VLAD virus creation team created the Bizatch virus (also known as the “Boza” virus), which was the first virus known to affect Windows 95.
- At the end of 1997, Cabanas, the first known virus directed to Windows NT, was launched.
- ILOVEYOU is considered one of the most virulent computer viruses ever created. That managed to wreak havoc on computer systems around the world, with around $10 billion in damage.