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DP32 First Virus: Elk Cloner
There are many kind of viruses in the world, but the one to really start it all was the Elk Cloner virus. Similar to the origin story of the worm virus, this virus entered into the world by accident… Sorta.
Developed by entrepreneur Rich Skrenta, at age 15, he created this virus as a practical joke and placed it on a floppy disk. Little did he expect that the virus would latch onto Apple II operating system and start to wreak havoc.
This was the very first virus that was spread out in the wild. It wasn’t created in a lab nor was it contained within a specific computer system. How it moved from computer to computer was via the floppy disks and using a technique called boot sector virus.
How the virus worked was that it was attached to a game which was set to play automatically. After the 50th time the game started up, the virus would be released. People discovered this because on the 50th time, the graphics would change. Instead of the loading screen, users were greeted to a poem. This poem was what gave the virus the name Elk Cloner:
Elk Cloner: The program with a personality
It will get on all your disks
It will infiltrate your chips
Yes, it's Cloner!
It will stick to you like glue
It will modify RAM too
Send in the Cloner!
Just as the poem stated, the virus clung to everything and in this case it kind of behaved like a worm. How it spread was solely based on the amount of floppy disks that you had. Basically if the computer booted up from an infected disk, the virus would copy itself in the computer’s memory. Every time after that, if an uninfected disk was inserted, the virus would then latch onto that floppy disk and spread that way.
Overall, the Elk Cloner didn’t cause any kind of harm unlike the damages that occurred with worms. The only real issue was when you used Apple DOS disks that didn’t have standard images, their reserved tracks were overwritten.
Still, despite the damages being minimal at best, many still remember this virus and was regarded as one of the first large-scale self-spreading personal computer virus ever made.
As for Skrenta himself, he wasn’t punished for his actions. He was a prankster and a lot of his friends knew that.
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By dpappThere are many kind of viruses in the world, but the one to really start it all was the Elk Cloner virus. Similar to the origin story of the worm virus, this virus entered into the world by accident… Sorta.
Developed by entrepreneur Rich Skrenta, at age 15, he created this virus as a practical joke and placed it on a floppy disk. Little did he expect that the virus would latch onto Apple II operating system and start to wreak havoc.
This was the very first virus that was spread out in the wild. It wasn’t created in a lab nor was it contained within a specific computer system. How it moved from computer to computer was via the floppy disks and using a technique called boot sector virus.
How the virus worked was that it was attached to a game which was set to play automatically. After the 50th time the game started up, the virus would be released. People discovered this because on the 50th time, the graphics would change. Instead of the loading screen, users were greeted to a poem. This poem was what gave the virus the name Elk Cloner:
Elk Cloner: The program with a personality
It will get on all your disks
It will infiltrate your chips
Yes, it's Cloner!
It will stick to you like glue
It will modify RAM too
Send in the Cloner!
Just as the poem stated, the virus clung to everything and in this case it kind of behaved like a worm. How it spread was solely based on the amount of floppy disks that you had. Basically if the computer booted up from an infected disk, the virus would copy itself in the computer’s memory. Every time after that, if an uninfected disk was inserted, the virus would then latch onto that floppy disk and spread that way.
Overall, the Elk Cloner didn’t cause any kind of harm unlike the damages that occurred with worms. The only real issue was when you used Apple DOS disks that didn’t have standard images, their reserved tracks were overwritten.
Still, despite the damages being minimal at best, many still remember this virus and was regarded as one of the first large-scale self-spreading personal computer virus ever made.
As for Skrenta himself, he wasn’t punished for his actions. He was a prankster and a lot of his friends knew that.