I Love You, says 25-year-young bug to computer

BANGALORE, INDIA: When someone says ‘I Love You’, you get excited. When someone offers you the nude photograph of some sex kitten – be it Madonna, Marilyn Monroe or the Russian tennis star Anna Kournikova, you get tempted.

And it is this element of curious temptation for the ‘forbidden fruit’ that most of the virus writers exploit today, even after 25 years when officially the first ‘virus’ hit a computer.

When Frederick Cohen developed and released the very first computer virus in a controlled experiment in a class at the University of Southern California, 25 years ago, on November 10, 1983, he would not have thought that the ‘bug’ would be the greatest menace ever for the computer users in the coming time.

He developed the parasitic application that seized control of computer operations, as part of a weekly seminar at the School of Engineering taught by computer-programming expert Leonard Adleman.

It was Adleman only who named it ‘virus’. Cohen defined a 'virus' as "a program that can 'infect' other programs by modifying them to include a possibly evolved copy of itself".

However, if we look at the history, it can be seen that ‘virus’ that could infect any computer had taken birth way back in 1970. The creator of that bug, called ‘Creeper’ is unknown even today! And many other such programs followed.

It was the Internet revolution that further increased the threat of virus. If the bug was spread through floppy disks in the initial years, the Internet opened the new possibility of spreading the infection.

The first major virus hit in the Internet was in 1999, when Melissa infected the address book of Microsoft Outlook and sent an infected e-mail to all the e-mail addresses.

Then came the ‘Love Bug’ in 2000 and was followed by the Nimda and Code Red. Likewise, Anna Kournikova also plundered many of the address book of the Microsoft Outlook e-mail programme and sent mails on itself to all the people listed there.

The irony is that it was Fred Cohen only who pioneered the developing of computer virus software and defence systems, he also admitted that there is no computer algorithm that can be written to detect and perfectly identify all computer viruses.

The cruel joke of the invention surpassing the inventor! Still everybody is hopeful of reigning the Trojan horse.

While speaking at the World Economic Forum in 2004, Bill Gates had predicted that “Two years from now, spam will be solved”.

Interestingly enough, John McAfee had made the same observation way back in 1998: “The problem of viruses is temporary and will be solved in two years.”

Still the bug is there, alive and kicking; gaining strength every moment and mocking at those predictions... in various avtars…Anna Kournikova, Barack Obama… you name it.

Don't you think the funding for the virus writers is a subject worth investigation?