Happy Birthday, Brain.A Virus

Yea, you heard it right. Brain.A strikes 20years old this month. It may not be something worth celebrating, but here's some additional info worth to remember...

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.

The first worm surfaced two years after Brain.A, when the Morris Worm hit Unix systems connected to the Internet.

Source News.com