Looking Back at the First Virus
What started as a prank turned out to be a significant moment in computing history.
In January 1982, 15-year-old high school student and programmer Rich Skrenta wrote a virus. The code he wrote, dubbed ‘Elk Cloner’, would become part of the timeline in computing history - the first virus successfully copying itself "in the wild". Previous ones that people had written only replicated in the laboratory.
The computer virus at first attached itself to the Apple II operating system, causing owners of personal computers causing quite a few headaches. So what exactly was Elk Cloner?
As a teenager, Skrenta had already earned a reputation among friends as something of a computer prankster – altering code on computer game discs which showed users an on-screen taunt. So much so that his friends stopped accepting floppy disks from him. So he had to find new ways to spread his tricky little bits of computer code.
“It was some dumb little practical joke. I guess if you had to pick between being known for this and not being known for anything, I’d rather be known for this.” - Rich Skrenta (2007)
It was on the Apple II computer that Skrenta had his "success" (hard to call making a virus a success!). His virus targeted the boot sector of a target’s hard drive, SSD or floppy discs.
Upon start-up, the virus made a copy of itself in the computer’s memory and, when the oblivious user then inserted another disc, the virus would replicate and copy itself onto the new host disc. It would copy itself on every new disk that was inserted into the computer.
Every 50th time an infected disc was booted, a user was met with a blank screen and a message:
“It will get on all your disks, it will infiltrate your chips, yes it’s a cloner!”
Despite his cunning, he did leave a fairly easy way to disable the virus from copying any further. When infecting a new device, it made some code on the drive to show that this drive had already been infected. The solution was to add this code to your drives, and then the virus would think you were infected already and wouldn't copy itself.
While Elk Cloner was irritating for those infected, the virus, like many of the early ones, was relatively harmless - many that followed, such as MX95 were very nasty and wiped all your data.
The invention of Elk Cloner virus did mark a significant moment in dark side of computing history - the first virus to self replicate in the wild.