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San Francisco – The Conficker worm’s creators are evidently toying with ways to put the pervasive computer virus to work firing off spam or spreading rogue anti-virus applications called “scareware”.

An April update sent to a tiny percentage of infected computers had the machines retrieve components of notorious Storm and Waledac worms unleashed in past years [...]

Tokyo – Japan has reported no human cases of deadly swine flu so far – but a computer virus of the same name has been spreading on the Internet in recent days, authorities warned on Thursday.

Japan’s National Institute of Infectious Diseases (NIID) said on its website that a suspicious Japanese-language email message with an attached [...]

San Francisco – Computer security top guns around the world watched warily as the dreaded Conficker worm squirmed deeper into infected machines with the arrival of an April 1st trigger date.

The malicious software evolved, as expected, from East to West, beginning in time zones first to greet April Fool’s Day.

“Planes are not going to fall [...]

San Francisco – The dreaded Conficker computer worm is stirring. Security experts say the worm’s authors appear to be trying to build a big moneymaker, but not a cyber weapon of mass destruction as many people feared.

As many as 12 million computers have been infected by Conficker. Security firm Trend Micro says some of the [...]

San Francisco – The Conficker worm’s April 1st trigger date came and went without the bedevilling computer virus causing any mischief but security specialists warn that the threat is far from over.

Conficker did just what the “white hats” tracking it expected – the virus evolved to better resist extermination and make its masters tougher to [...]

Boston – A malicious software program known as Conficker that many feared would wreak havoc on April 1 is slowly being activated, weeks after being dismissed as a false alarm, security experts said.

Conficker, also known as Downadup or Kido, is quietly turning thousands of personal computers into servers of e-mail spam and installing spyware, they [...]

To continue…

In just a year production of polymorphic viruses became a “trade”, followed by their “avalanche” in 1993. The authors of viruses were competing not in creating the toughest virus but the toughest polymorphic mechanism instead. These viruses require special methods of detection, including emulation of the viruses’ executable code, mathematical algorithms of restoring parts [...]

I asked myself the question many times – “Why viruses on the Internet and where did it started?” I did some research to learn more about it…

THE HISTORY OF COMPUTER VIRUSES

A Bit of Archaeology

There are different opinions on the date of the first computer virus. The Nivac 1108 and IBM 360/370 already had them. Therefore [...]