IT Security: The Truth About Malware - Internet Security: IT Security

Solving the malware problem means understanding what it is - and what the bad guys can do with it.

Brian Robinson
January 26th, 2007

Malware itself is nothing new. Even in its broadest definition of a program that is somehow inserted into a computer system in order to disrupt that system or steal information from it, malware has been around since the1980s.

One of the first malware to get widespread notice was a worm written by Cornell University student Robert Morris, which he launched in November 1988 ostensibly as an exercise to gauge the size of the Internet. But a mistake in its coding enabled the worm to replicate and spread rapidly, eventually affecting thousands of computers.

And the art of building malware has also not changed much. The techniques developed during the 1980s and 1990s are pretty much the same that are used to develop malware now.

What has changed is the speed at which malware is developed and implemented, due to the emergence of automated tools. In the time it previously took to build just one by hand, malware can now be cranked out by the dozens.

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