The Viruses’ Appearance Chronology

Every year brings up new viruses so let’s have an overview of modern viruses’ history. The first macrovirus infecting MS Word documents appeared in 1995. The next year first Win32 viruses designed for Windows 95 appeared. In 1997 the viruses started using E-mails for distribution and those days users saw the viruses working in Intel processes protected regime (first introduced in i286). In 1998 the virus messing with hardware was developed. It was Win95.CIH (aka “Chernobyl” in Russia) that was activated on April 26th 1999 in millions PCs all over the world. In the end of 1998 appeared the first virus for Windows NT.

In 1999 E-mail worms were massively distributed. The Win95.Spanska.10000 (“Happy99”) pandemic started on January the 1st 1999 and ended in spring of 2002. Another E-mail worm Melissa in March of 1999 paralyzed the work of thousands European and American E-mail servers. By scope the Melissa pandemic may be compared to legendary “Morris’ worm” that in November 1988 stopped the operation of several big networks in USA. Also in 1999 the Trojans that enabled the remote access to infected PC via Internet for stealing certain information became very popular. The Trojans of Back Orifice, NetBus and Trojan Stealth families may be easily found in Internet and are actively used by hackers.

On March the 1st 2000 I-Worm LoveLetter was detected in Hong Kong. Over 4 days this worm had 3 mutations and by 5th of May it infected 3.1 million computers over the world bringing $1.54 billion damages (by Trend Micro data). This worm sending itself to all addresses from Outlook address book of infected PC entered The Guinness Record as the most destructive virus in the world.

In September 2001 was detected a virus and 5 its modifications able to get into PC by several ways. First one was through E-mail when users were getting HTML letters containing some integrated objects that secretly activated when opening the letters. The second way was through accessing some infected websites that showed users a modified webpage instead of original one. The third one was through the local network resources as the worm scanned them all integrating there its copies. The final way was through the web servers under Microsoft Internet Information Server leading to loss of confidential data from infected PCs. The worm was adding the user to “Administration” group getting complete access to all PC resources while secretly opening all local disks for free public access.

As computer systems and antiviruses were developing the viruses were also changing obtaining new mechanisms for distribution. With time some types of viruses just disappeared and some became more active and aggressive. Over the past year the most damages caused CodeRed and SirCam and still it may not be compared with I Love You negative outcomes.

Still, the specialists insist those digits are far behind the real ones. First, not all companies evaluate or submit their losses. And second, when evaluating losses the companies do not take into account many factors such as missed opportunities. Only thanks to antivirus companies the losses brought up by viruses don’t reach the astronomic values.

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