Word: spread
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...last count, more than 25 different viral strains had been isolated, and new ones are emerging nearly every week. Some are relatively benign, like the virus spread through the CompuServe network that causes machines equipped with voice synthesizers to intone the words "Don't panic." Others are more of a nuisance, causing temporary malfunctions or making it difficult to run isolated programs. But some seem bent on destroying valuable data. "Your worst fear has come true," wrote a computer buff in a report he posted on an electronic bulletin board to warn other users about a new Macintosh virus...
...perpetrators of this mischief? At first glance they seem an odd and varied lot. The Pakistani brothers are self-taught programmers isolated from the rest of the computer community. Two viruses exported to the U.S. from West Germany, by contrast, were bred in academia and spread by students. Other outbreaks seem to have come directly out of Silicon Valley. Rumor has it that the SCORES virus was written by a disgruntled Apple employee...
...what made this virus special was how it spread. Brandow, who collaborated with Davidson in creating it, inserted the virus into game disks that were distributed at meetings of a Montreal Macintosh users group. A speaker at one meeting was a Chicago software executive named Marc Canter, whose company was doing some contract work for Aldus Corp., a Seattle-based software publisher. Canter innocently picked up a copy of the infected disk, tried it out on his office computer, and then proceeded, on the same machine, to review a piece of software being prepared for shipment to Aldus. Unaware that...
...some cases, the threat of a virus is enough to spread panic. When scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab were warned by a Government security center last May that a virus lurking in the lab's 450 computers was set to be activated that day, many users stopped work and began feverishly making backup copies of all their disks. The warning of a virus proved to be a hoax, but in such an atmosphere, says Chuck Cole, Livermore's deputy computer- security manager, "a hoax can be as disruptive as the real thing...
These clandestine battles, which took place late at night when computer usage was low, were quietly sanctioned by Bell Labs' bemused managers, many of whom were senior scientists. The fun soon spread to other leading computer- research facilities, including Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center and the artificial-intelligence lab at M.I.T...