Viruses

I found an interesting article via Digg about twenty years of computer viruses.

Touch wood I’ve been virus free for over a dozen years. Good practice and a well honed sense of paranoia I guess.

My ‘virus claim to fame’ was being one of the first people to find ‘SMEG.Pathogen‘ in the wild – this was in the summer of 1994. I found it on a hard drive from a customers laptop.

It infected a lot of my floppy disks and my main PC. I vividly remember thinking that ‘something was wrong’ with my system – and I took an example of an infected executable to the Dr Solomons labs in Aylesbury on a day off. I remember meeting Graham Clulely and getting some raw code to at least detect and quarantine this first polymorphic virus.

I had to give a few statements to the police – including a ‘financial impact statement’ describing how much the outbreak had personally cost me and my company.

The virus author – Chris Pile – was famously sentenced to 18 months.