World’s first computer virus was made by Pakistani

http://news.com.com/Happy+birthday%2C+Brain.A/2100-7349_3-6028989.html?tag=nefd.top1

By Joris Evers
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Published: January 19, 2006, 3:51 PM PST

Unless you're in the antivirus business, it's probably not worth celebrating. But 20 years ago this month, the first PC virus was discovered.

Dubbed Brain.A, the virus got onto computers via floppy disk and infected the boot sector of PCs, according to Finnish antivirus maker F-Secure, which devoted a blog post and news release to the occasion on Thursday.

"While the virus 'Brain' itself was relatively harmless, it set in motion a long chain of events leading up to today's virus situation," F-Secure said.

Brain.A and other "boot sector" viruses are long extinct. The same could be said of the medium used to spread them: The boot sector is typically the first 512 bytes of a hard disk or floppy disk.

Viruses have evolved significantly since Brain.A, but boot sector viruses were around from 1986 to 1995, according to F-Secure. Macro viruses arrived next, exploiting early Microsoft Windows operating systems. The advent of e-mail subsequently propelled e-mail viruses such as the I Love You and the Anna Kournikova virus.

http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/brain.shtml

F-Secure Press Release

This is the oldest PC virus known, first detected in January '86. Several variants of this virus are known, but most of them are fairly harmless. This virus is rather large and most of it is located in sectors that are marked as "bad" in the FAT.

Before this virus infects diskettes, it looks for a "signature". This makes it possible to "inoculate" against it, just by putting the signature in the correct place in the boot sector.

The Brain virus tries to hide from detection by hooking into INT 13. When an attempt is made to read an infected boot sector, Brain will just show you the original boot sector instead. This means that if you look at the boot sector using DEBUG or any similar program, everything will look normal, if the virus is active in memory. This means the virus is the first "stealth" virus as well.

The major effect of this virus is a (fairly harmless) change of the volume label. It usually becomes

(c) Brain

but one variant of the virus changes the text into

(c) ashar

One of the most interesting details regarding the Brain virus is the following text, which appears inside it:

Welcome to the Dungeon
(c) 1986 Basit & Amjad (pvt) Ltd.
BRAIN COMPUTER SERVICES
730 NIZAB BLOCK ALLAMA IQBAL TOWN
LAHORE-PAKISTAN
PHONE :430791,443248,280530.
Beware of this VIRUS....
Contact us for vaccination........... $#@%$@!!

In another version of the virus, the text looks like this:

Welcome to the Dungeon
(c) 1986 Brain & Amjads (pvt) Ltd.
VIRUS_SHOE RECORD v9.0
Dedicated to the dynamic memories of millions of virus who are no longer with us today - Thanks GOODNESS!!
BEWARE OF THE er..VIRUS :This program is catching program follows after these messeges..... $#@%$@!!

These messages have led to considerable speculation regarding the possible author(s) of the virus.

One harmful variant has been reported, which will attack on May 5. 1992.

Nowadays Brain is extinct.