History Of Hacking prt 2 By CEO of TIA

Somewhere in the book of history, back in the days, when hackers were actually hackers, many things happened, good and bad, for better or worse.

The year was 1982, a teenager of 15 years old, high school student in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania was bored and thought to prank his friend for fun. His name was Richard Skrenta and he had no idea he was setting the foundation of a phenomena that will evolve and escalate into something big, so big it is worth billions of dollars yearly nowadays.

Richard Skrenta scripted a harmless computer virus to target Apple-II platforms (on DOS 3.3). He named his newly scripted virus "Elk Cloner".

Elk Cloner was one of the first known self-replicating computer viruses to spread in the wild.

In fact, Elk Cloner was also the first known computer virus to spread beyond its creator's control setting the stage for modern concept of "In The Wild" as a term widely used in nowadays cyber attacks' field.

Elk Cloner virus infected floppy disks and used them as a medium to spread across devices since floppy disks were the primary medium for transferring files in the early 1980s. When an infected floppy disk was booted, the virus would copy itself to the memory of the computer and subsequently infect any uninfected disk when inserted into the system.

However, the said virus was harmless, made by prankster who always created "pranky" software, disruptive but non-malicious, all it did was display a message on the infected systems, the message displayed was documented to be:

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!

Richard Skrenta later became a successful entrepreneur, co-founding Newhoo (later rebranded as the Open Directory Project), which was acquired by Netscape, he also worked on many other tech ventures.

... But then, years later, "skiddies" happened...

(History Of Hacking Part 3. Read more)

By Elie Ghabash

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