Which was the first Windows Virus?
In 1986, the first PC virus was created. It was the Brain virus from Pakistan. Brain was a boot sector virus and only infected 360k floppy disks. Interestingly, even though it was the first virus, it had full-stealth capability.
Stoned was the first MBR infector and was written by a student at the University of Wellington in New Zealand.
Several innovative viruses appeared in 1992:
- EXEBug introduced CMOS modification to prevent clean booting.
- Groove was the first .EXE infecting MtE virus. It also targeted many anti-virus products.
- Invol was the first .SYS infector. It was also slightly polymorphic.
- Starship was a SPM, slow infector. It also introduced a new way to infect the hard drive.
- V-Sign was the first polymorphic boot sector virus.
- WinVer 1.4 was the first Windows virus.
Which was the first AntiVirus?
There are competing claims for the innovator of the first antivirus product. Possibly the first publicly documented removal of a computer virus in the wild was performed by Bernd Fix in 1987.
By the end of 1990 there were a number of anti-virus products available.
- AntiVirus Plus from Iris
- Certus from Certus International
- Data Physician from Digital Dispatch
- Turbo Antivirus from Carmel
- Virex-PC from Microcom
- Virucide (McAfee’s Pro-Scan) from Parsons
- Virusafe from Elia Shim
- ViruScan from McAfee
- Dr. Solomon’s Anti-Virus Toolkit from S&S
- F-Prot from Frisk Software
- ThunderByte from ESaSS
- Vaccine from Sophos
- Vaccine from World Wide Data
- V-Analyst from BRM
- Vet from Cybec
- VirusBuster from Hunix
- Virscan from IBM
- Vi-Spy from RG Software
One other product appeared in December of 1990. Its release foreshadowed a new direction the antivirus industry would take in 1991.
The product was Norton AntiVirus!
Sourced from IBM Research. Addl read: Wikipedia.
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