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In a follow-up article for Scientific American, Dewdney shared a letter from two Italian readers who were inspired by their experience with Core War to create a real virus on the Apple II. The brainchild of Pakistani brothers and software engineers, Basit and Amjad Farooq, Brain acted like an early form of copyright protection, stopping people from pirating their heart monitoring software. Other than guilt tripping victims in to paying for their pirated software, Brain had no harmful effects.

BHP also has the distinction of being the first stealth virus; that is, a virus that avoids detection by hiding the changes it makes to a target system and its files. The cover image depicted viruses as cute, googly eyed cartoon insects crawling all over a desktop computer. Up to this point, computer viruses were relatively harmless.

Yes, they were annoying, but not destructive. So how did computer viruses go from nuisance threat to system destroying plague? The MacMag virus caused infected Macs to display an onscreen message on March 2, The infected Freehand was then copied and shipped to several thousand customers, making MacMag the first virus spread via legitimate commercial software product. The Morris worm knocked out more than 6, computers as it spread across the ARPANET , a government operated early version of the Internet restricted to schools and military installations.

The Morris worm was the first known use of a dictionary attack. As the name suggests, a dictionary attack involves taking a list of words and using it to try and guess the username and password combination of a target system.

Robert Morris was the first person charged under the newly enacted Computer Fraud and Abuse Act , which made it illegal to mess with government and financial systems, and any computer that contributes to US commerce and communications.

In his defense, Morris never intended his namesake worm to cause so much damage. According to Morris, the worm was designed to test security flaws and estimate the size of the early Internet. A bug caused the worm to infect targeted systems over and over again, with each subsequent infection consuming processing power until the system crashed.

Victims received a 5. Joseph L. Popp, intended to draw parallels between his digital creation and the deadly AIDS virus. In an era before Bitcoin and other untraceable cryptocurrencies, victims had to send ransom funds to a PO box in Panama in order to receive the decryption software and regain access to their files.

There were 2. By the end of the decade, that number would surpass million. Traditional AV works by comparing the files on your computer with a giant list of known viruses. Every virus on the list is made of computer code and every snippet of code has a unique signature—like a fingerprint. If a snippet of code found on your computer matches that of a known virus in the database, the file is flagged. While each copy of the virus looked and acted the same, the underlying code was different.

This is called polymorphic code, making the first polymorphic virus. Melissa was a macro virus. Viruses of this type hide within the macro language commonly used in Microsoft Office files. Opening up a viral Word doc, Excel spreadsheet, etc.

Melissa was the fastest spreading virus up to that point, infecting approximately , computers, Medium reported. Viruses paved the way for a whole new generation of destructive malware. Cryptojackers stealthily used our computers to mine cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Ransomware held our computers hostage. Banking Trojans, like Emotet , stole our financial information. Spyware and keyloggers shoulder surfed us from across the web, stealing our usernames and passwords.

Old-school viruses were, for the most part, a thing of the past. Shamoon targeted computers and network systems belonging to Aramco, the state-owned Saudi Arabian oil company, in response to Saudi government policy decisions in the Middle East. In a perfect example of what comes around goes around, cybersecurity researchers have suggested the attack started with an infected USB storage drive—the modern equivalent of the floppy disks used to carry the very first virus, Elk Cloner.

The victim is served up a bogus pop-up ad after landing on a spoofed website or as a result of an adware infection. In a recent example , scammers used malvertising to link victims to malicious support sites after victims searched for things like cooking tips and recipes.

People years-old and over were five times more likely to report being a victim of a tech support scam. The official Malwarebytes logo The official Malwarebytes logo in a blue font. Online Privacy. Business Business Solutions. Get Started Find the right solution for your business See business pricing Don't know where to start? The worm took advantage of a buffer overflow vulnerability in Local Security Authority Subsystem Service LSASS , which controls the security policy of local accounts causing crashes to the computer.

It will also use the system resources to propagate itself to other machines through the Internet and infect others automatically. This led to more than a million infections , taking out critical infrastructures, such as airlines, news agencies, public transportation, hospitals, public transport, etc.

Jaschen was tried as a minor and received a 21 month suspended sentence. Zeus is a Trojan horse made to infect Windows computers so that it will perform various criminal tasks.

The most common of these tasks are usually man-in-the-browser keylogging and form grabbing. The majority of computers were infected either through drive-by downloads or phishing scams. First identified in , it managed to compromise thousands of FTP accounts and computers from large multinational corporations and banks such as Amazon, Oracle, Bank of America, Cisco, etc. Controllers of the Zeus botnet used it to steal the login credentials of social network, email and banking accounts.

The entire operation was sophisticated, involving people from around the world to act as money mules to smuggle and transfer cash to the ringleaders in Eastern Europe. In late , the creator of Zeus announced his retirement but many experts believe this to be false. Also known as Downup or Downadup , Conficker is a worm of unknown authorship for Windows that made its first appearance in The name comes form the English word, configure and a German pejorative.

It infects computers using flaws in the OS to create a botnet. The malware was able to infect more than 9 millions computers all around the world, affecting governments, businesses and individuals. The worm works by exploiting a network service vulnerability that was present and unpatched in Windows.

Once infected, the worm will then reset account lockout policies, block access to Windows update and antivirus sites, turn off certain services and lock out user accounts among many. Then, it proceeds to install software that will turn the computer into a botnet slave and scareware to scam money off the user. Microsoft later provided a fix and patch with many antivirus vendors providing updates to their definitions. Believed to have been created by the Israeli Defence Force together with the American Government, Stuxnet is an example of a virus created for the purpose of cyberwarfare , as it was intended to disrupt the nuclear efforts of the Iranians.

The computer worm was designed to attack industrial Programmable Logic Controllers PLC , which allows for automation of processes in machinery. It specifically aimed at those created by Siemens and was spread through infected USB drives. It altered the speed of the machinery, causing it to tear apart. Siemens eventually found a way to remove the malware from their software. It was named by McAfee employee Craig Schmugar, one of the people who had originally discovered it.

However, malware CAN cause a browser to open a blank page. If you suspect that your device is infected with malicious software, viruses, malware, etc. Remaining safe in a digital world means staying informed. Stopping about:blank pages depends on why they get displayed in the first place. If you get blank pages regularly, you would want to stop malware or viruses first because they can corrupt the browser, and then you can uninstall and reinstall Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or whatever you use.

Aside from the above two scenarios, you should probably leave the about:blank functionality alone. Many antivirus and anti-malware programs now use blank pages to prevent dangerous URLs from executing code or tricking you into taking action. If you changed your home page to a blank one, as previously mentioned, just go to settings and set your homepage to whatever you like. Most browsers provide past or pre-included options that can make it easier for you.

If you uninstalled and reinstalled your browser, simply type a new URL into the box or section. If the blank page problem persists, try disabling any extensions you have, close the browser, and re-open it.

Add-ons and extensions including pop-up blockers may cause problems, so disabling these may fix the problem.