Twenty years of viruses and still no cure
Published: 27 Nov 2003 15:25 GMT
John Walker, a UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Calculator) systems programmer for a large multinational firm, created his own version of the game in 1974, improving it so that erroneous information one player enters could eventually be corrected by another. The game was an immediate hit.
"I started getting calls from people at other UNIVAC installations asking for tapes of the game," he said.
From games to viruses
In the pre-Internet days, Walker found himself telling people to mail him a tape, onto which he would copy the program and return it. He quickly tired of the labourious process: "It was really annoying and got me thinking on how best to distribute the game. That's when I thought about making it self-reproducing."
In January 1975, Walker created another program, "Pervade", which would hitch a ride with a new version of "Animal". Any time someone played the "Animal" game, Pervade would also start running to check directories, duplicate itself in any directory that didn't already have a copy and overwrite any older versions.
Walker recalls reflecting on the implications of the program for a couple of months to ensure that he hadn't made any damaging errors. Then he released it.
Within a week, UNIVAC administrators at another corporate office started reporting that "Animal" had suddenly appeared on their system. Weeks later, other companies discovered the program on their systems as well.
"A few months later, a lot of people started talking about it, and that meant more people were asking for it," Walker said. "It propagated as much by word of mouth as by copying itself to new directories."
The Pervade program stopped working when UNIVAC released a new version of the operating system that changed its directory structure. But Walker insists that a modified copy of his program could have easily overcome its new security features.
"UNIVAC was putting forth all these security methods, and here was an example of a threat that all the defences couldn't do anything about," he said in comments Cohen would echo a decade later. Walker went on to found Autodesk in the early 1980s, and he remains the largest individual stockholder in the company.
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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
