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Twenty years of viruses and still no cure

Published: 27 Nov 2003 15:25 GMT

The birth of a concept
In a paper published the next year, he defined a virus as "a program that can 'infect' other programs by modifying them to include a possibly evolved copy of itself." Cohen proved that such a virus could spread through any system that allows information to be shared, interpreted in a general manner and given away, despite the presence of security technologies.

To demonstrate its potential dangers, Cohen created a test program to see how quickly the virus could spread and undermine the security of a mainframe computer system. He implanted the program in a command that presents Unix file structures graphically, then conducted five attack runs.

The virus managed to "gain system rights" -- essentially seizing control of the computer -- within an average of half an hour. The shortest run took five minutes.

"It could spread with all the security technologies out there at the time," Cohen said. "The concept showed that the least trusted user is the weakest link, and the program can quickly spread up to the most trusted user."

Cohen's work provided a concrete definition of a virus and showed how other programs, such as worms, are a subset of that definition. But a few viruslike programs existed before his research, and many of its theoretical underpinnings were established by John von Neumann, one of the founding fathers of computer science.

Born in Hungary in 1903, von Neumann was responsible for seminal work in many branches of computer science, mathematics and physics, including logical analysis of a strategy called game theory and the newly born branch of quantum physics. Between 1948 and 1956, he extended much of the work to one of his peers, famed computer scientist Alan Turing.

Turing had come up with idea of a universal computing system, a logical construct that could solve a wide variety of problems by using a processor and a tape to store programs and data. Computers still use the basic division of labour Turing identified: processors and storage.

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This just about takes de biscuit. Robert H. Fieldm... Darryl Shawnmeyer
if only one day the virus and worm creators would... Anonymous

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It seems to me this is a burden being placed on the wrong shoulders. There is not an It system in the world that can stop an individual taking information in their heads and spewing out at the nearest undesirable third party.