Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => The O' Club => Topic started by: Vulcan on January 19, 2006, 08:24:03 PM
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Wow, saw this headline today, apparently 20 years ago the Brain.A virus was first detected.
A flood of memories came back to me from that 'era'. At the time I was working in a computer retail store, we'd been doing a lot in the PC side with Amstrad PC's (8086 based beasties). I was big into the BBS scene (ran Wildcat, PCboard for a few years, even wrote up a crappy turn based BBS game called warlords in Borland Turbo Prolog). I also had an extremely dodgey phone line that allowed me 'cheap' int'l calls, and I became a member of BBS's such as the Hackers Den and Pirates Cove (legendery in those days).
One crappy wellington day, a southerly was blowing in (our southerlies come in off antartica, they can be quite nasty). It was just plain nasty. A friend of mine from BBS scene strolled in, a young geek with an awesome ability in assembler on the PC. We was a student at Vic Uni, which was a long walk for a poor uni student in shorts and jandals. At the time I had some PC gamer mag in front of me from the UK, with a big article from Dr Solomon about virus's. SJ was bored, so I said "write a virus", he agreed, but only if I brought him a bottle of coke from the bakery next door, and so he complied.
Less than an hour later he had coded a virus, and the cleaner, tested it and cleaned it. Amazing stuff. It was only ~414 bytes long, a work of art, and was designed to deliver a message once in seven boots ... "Your PC is now stoned". We each took a copy of the source, a master "infector", and an infected 5.25" floppy and filled it away.
6 months later once again I'm browsing a local computer rag, Computerworld I think it was, and there is a report of "Stoned" PC's at Otago polytech (other end of the country), I freeze as my eyes absorb the story realizing what had happened. I ring SJ and he freaks, a little investigation reveals his "master" disk is missing, his little brother (also a budding programmer) has a friend at Otago Polytech, turns out he swiped some disks including the master.
From there the thing spread like wildfire, across the world... amazing considering we didn't have the net available to the public like it is now. So this virus was spreading via sneaker networks.
Kind of makes me feel old.
This is all hypothetical conjecture of course ;)
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Knowing our world, you'll have 25+ government agencies fighting each other to get to your door first sometime within the next couple days. :D
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Nah, doubt it. The virus was never 'released', the cleaner was made public the moment it was in the wild, plus the method of spreading usually involved use of unauthorised software (games) usually obtained by illegal means (copies!). Back then there were no laws addressing this sort of thing either.
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If you or I write a program that basically amounts to graffitti, it's called a virus and we'll probably go to jail.
If a corporation does it, it's called spyware at best or malware at worst and absolutely nothing happens to them.
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I take the thought of some pimple geek hacker/cracker phishin or Hijackin my puter serious... If I knew where you and the likes of you lived I'd leave all your tulips fingerless.
With Love,
Mac
,,!,.
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Originally posted by AWMac
I take the thought of some pimple geek hacker/cracker phishin or Hijackin my puter serious... If I knew where you and the likes of you lived I'd leave all your tulips fingerless.
:eek: :confused:
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Originally posted by AWMac
I take the thought of some pimple geek hacker/cracker phishin or Hijackin my puter serious... If I knew where you and the likes of you lived I'd leave all your tulips fingerless.
With Love,
Mac
,,!,.
You don't want me, you want the little fart that took the code and spread it with malicious intent. Did you even own a PC 20 years ago Mac?
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Vulcan in the end it was the fault of you and your friend for creating such an evil thing. My wise uncle once told me,"With great power comes great responsiblity". Too bad you never heard this.:p
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Good story Vulcan!
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Originally posted by AWMac
If I knew where you and the likes of you lived I'd leave all your tulips fingerless.
With Love,
Mac
,,!,.
stop it ... you makes me fell horny...
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Originally posted by RightF00T
Vulcan in the end it was the fault of you and your friend for creating such an evil thing. My wise uncle once told me,"With great power comes great responsiblity". Too bad you never heard this.:p
So you're Spiderman!!