Every year seems to mark a new record for the most new malware introduced, as well as the most systems impacted by malware.The year 2003 was not only a recordsetting year for malware but also the 20th anniversary of computer viruses.
In 1983, graduate student Fred Cohen first used the term virus in a paper describing a program that can spread by infecting other computers with copies of itself.There were a handful of viruses discovered over the next 15 years, but it wasn’t until 1999, when the Melissa virus stormed the Internet, that viruses became common knowledge.
Since then, there have been a number of high-profile viruses and worms which have spread rapidly around the world. Code Red, Nimda, Slammer, and MyDoom are virtually household words today.The number of new malware threats and the speed at which the threats spread across the Internet has grown each year.
The Brain virus was the first virus designed to infect personal computer systems. It was introduced in 1986, at a time when the general public didn’t know what the Internet was and the World Wide Web had not even been created. It could only spread to other computers by infecting floppy disks that were passed between users and therefore had much less impact. Compare that with more recent threats such as SQL Slammer which, by spreading through the Internet to the millions of computers now connected to it, was able to infect hundreds of thousands of computers and cripple the Internet in less than 30 minutes.
Gone are the days when new threats were few and far between and had no simple means of propagating from system to system.The explosion of the Internet and the advent of broadband Internet service mean that there are millions of computers with high-speed connections linked to the Internet at any given moment.
With millions of potential targets, it is almost a guarantee that at least a few thousand will fall victim to a new threat.
As we discussed earlier in the book, when you are on the Internet you are a part of a worldwide network of computers.You have a responsibility to the rest of us sharing the network with you to make sure your computer system is not infected and spreading malware to everyone else. It is much less of a headache and a lot easier in the long run to proactively make sure your system is secure and to protect yourself by installing antivirus software to detect and remove threats such as these before they infect your computer system.
