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Viruses, Worms,
Trojans, Bombs

The first documented computer virus attack was recorded on 22 October 1987 at the University of Delaware in Newark, Delaware. According to a spokesperson for the Academic Computer Center at the University, the virus infected ‘several hundred disks, making one per cent unusable, and destroyed at least one student’s thesis.’ Later a news report appeared in the New York Times that claimed: ‘Buried within the code of the virus . . . was an apparent ransom demand. Computer users were asked to send $2,000 to an address in Pakistan to obtain an immunity program . . .’

That wasn’t quite true. Researchers using specialized software were later able to call up the actual operating program of the virus on to a computer screen. Within the mass of instructions that controlled the bug they found the following message:

Welcome to the Dungeon
© 1986 Basit & Amjad (pvt) Ltd.
BRAIN COMPUTER SERVICES
730 NIZAB BLOCK ALLAMA IQBAL TOWN
LAHORE-PAKISTAN
PHONE: 430791, 443248, 280530.
Beware of this VIRUS . . .
Contact us for vaccination . . .

There was no ransom demand.

Computer researchers now know the virus as Brain, though at the time it didn’t have a name, and it was found that the virus was programmed to infect the first sector on a diskette. Diskettes are segmented into little pie-shaped sectors invisible to the naked eye, each holding 512 bytes (or characters) of information, equivalent to

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