10-04-2017, 09:17 PM
Antivirus or anti-virus software (often abbreviated as AV), sometimes known as anti-malware software, is computer software used to prevent, detect and remove malicious software.[1]
Antivirus software was originally developed to detect and remove computer viruses, hence the name. However, with the proliferation of other kinds of malware, antivirus software started to provide protection from other computer threats. In particular, modern antivirus software can protect from: malicious browser helper objects (BHOs), browser hijackers, ransomware, keyloggers, backdoors, rootkits, trojan horses, worms, malicious LSPs, dialers, fraudtools, adware and spyware.[2] Some products also include protection from other computer threats, such as infected and malicious URLs, spam, scam and phishing attacks, online identity (privacy), online banking attacks, social engineering techniques, advanced persistent threat (APT) and botnet DDoS attacks.[3]
1949 1980 period (pre-antivirus days)
Although the roots of the computer virus date back as early as 1949, when the Hungarian scientist John von Neumann published the "Theory of self-reproducing automata",[4] the first known computer virus appeared in 1971 and was dubbed the "Creeper virus".[5] This computer virus infected Digital Equipment Corporation's (DEC) PDP-10 mainframe computers running the TENEX operating system.[6][7]
The Creeper virus was eventually deleted by a program created by Ray Tomlinson and known as "The Reaper".[8] Some people consider "The Reaper" the first antivirus software ever written it may be the case, but it is important to note that the Reaper was actually a virus itself specifically designed to remove the Creeper virus.[8][9][10]
The Creeper virus was followed by several other viruses. The first known that appeared "in the wild" was "Elk Cloner", in 1981, which infected Apple II computers.[11][12][13]
In 1983, the term "computer virus" was coined by Fred Cohen in one of the first ever published academic papers on computer viruses.[14] Cohen used the term "computer virus" to describe a program that: "affect other computer programs by modifying them in such a way as to include a (possibly evolved) copy of itself."[15] (note that a more recent, and precise, definition of computer virus has been given by the Hungarian security researcher P ter Sz r: "a code that recursively replicates a possibly evolved copy of itself"[16][17])
The first IBM PC compatible "in the wild" computer virus, and one of the first real widespread infections, was "Brain" in 1986. From then, the number of viruses has grown exponentially.[18][19] Most of the computer viruses written in the early and mid-1980s were limited to self-reproduction and had no specific damage routine built into the code. That changed when more and more programmers became acquainted with computer virus programming and created viruses that manipulated or even destroyed data on infected computers.[20]
Before internet connectivity was widespread, computer viruses were typically spread by infected floppy disks. Antivirus software came into use, but was updated relatively infrequently. During this time, virus checkers essentially had to check executable files and the boot sectors of floppy disks and hard disks. However, as internet usage became common, viruses began to spread online.[21]
1980 1990 period (early days)
There are competing claims for the innovator of the first antivirus product. Possibly, the first publicly documented removal of an "in the wild" computer virus (i.e. the "Vienna virus") was performed by Bernd Fix in 1987.[22][23]
In 1987, Andreas L ning and Kai Figge founded G Data Software and released their first antivirus product for the Atari ST platform.[24] Dubiously, they later also produced Virus Construction Kits.[25] In 1987, the Ultimate Virus Killer (UVK) was also released.[26] This was the de facto industry standard virus killer for the Atari ST and Atari Falcon, the last version of which (version 9.0) was released in April 2004.[citation needed] In 1987, in USA, John McAfee founded the McAfee company (now part of Intel Security[27]) and, at the end of that year, he released the first version of VirusScan.[28] In the meanwhile, in Slovakia, Peter Pa ko and Miroslav Trnka created the first version of NOD32 antivirus (albeit they established ESET only in 1992).[29][30]
In 1987, Fred Cohen wrote that there is no algorithm that can perfectly detect all possible computer viruses.[31]
Finally, in the end of 1987, the first two heuristic antivirus utilities were released: FluShot Plus by Ross Greenberg[32][33][34] and Anti4us by Erwin Lanting.[35][36] However, the kind of heuristic they were using was totally different from the one used today by many antivirus products. The first antivirus product with a heuristic engine which resembles the ones used nowadays was F-PROT in 1991.[37] The early heuristic engines were based on dividing the binary in different sections: data section, code section (in legitimate binary it usually starts always from the same location). Indeed, the initial viruses re-organise the layout of the sections, or override the initial portion of section in order to jump to the very end of the file where malicious code was located and then, later on, go back to resume the execution of the original code. This was a very specific pattern, not used at the time by any legitimate software, that initially represented a very nice heuristic to catch where something was suspicious or not. Later, in time, other kind of more advanced heuristics have been added, such as: suspicious sections name, incorrect header size, wildcards and regular expressions and partial pattern in-memory matching.
In 1988, the growth of antivirus companies continued. In Germany, Tjark Auerbach founded Avira (H+BEDV at the time) and released the first version of AntiVir (named "Luke Filewalker" at the time). In Bulgaria, Dr. Vesselin Bontchev released his first freeware antivirus program (he later joined FRISK Software). Also Frans Veldman released the first version of ThunderByte Antivirus, also known as TBAV (he sold his company to Norman Safeground in 1998). In Czech Republic, Pavel Baudi and Eduard Ku era started avast! (at the time ALWIL Software) and released their first version of avast! antivirus. In June 1988, in South Korea, Dr. Ahn Cheol-Soo released its first antivirus software, called V1 (he founded AhnLab later in 1995). Finally, in the Autumn 1988, in United Kingdom, Alan Solomon founded S&S International and created his Dr. Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit (although he launched it commercially only in 1991 in 1998 Dr. Solomon s company was acquired by McAfee). In November 1988 a professor at the Panamerican University in Mexico City named Alejandro E. Carriles copyrighted the first antivirus software in Mexico under the name "Byte Matabichos" (Byte Bugkiller) to help solve the rampant virus infestation among students.[38]
