Redazione RHC : 3 August 2025 10:53
In the late 1990s, when the Internet was still very young, it was common for tech-savvy kids to scare their friends by controlling (or, in Internet parlance, “trolling”) their PCs remotely.
They’d open the CD tray, swap mouse buttons, or change the desktop colors, and to the unsuspecting user, it would seem as if a ghost were taking control of the machine.
Recall the story of Elk cloner (the virus with a “personality”), one of the first known microcomputer viruses to spread outside the computer system or the lab where it was written.
It attacked the Apple II operating system and spread via floppy disks. It was written by programmer and entrepreneur Rich Skrenta (pictured on the cover) around 1982, when he was a 15-year-old high school student, originally as a prank on his friends.
Elk Cloner spread by infecting the Apple DOS 3.3 operating system using a technique now known as a boot sector virus.
It was inserted into a floppy disk along with the game, and after the fiftieth time the game was launched, it would boot and a blank screen would appear, displaying a poem on the monitor that read:
Elk Cloner: The program with a personalityIt will get on all your disksIt will infiltrate your chipsYes, it’s Cloner!It will stick to you like glueIt will modify RAM tooSend in the Cloner!
If a computer booted from an infected floppy disk, a copy of the virus was inserted into the computer’s memory. When an uninfected disk was inserted into the computer, the entire DOS (including Elk Cloner) was copied to the disk.
Skrenta already had a reputation for pranks among his friends because, while sharing computer games and software, he often altered floppy disks to shut down their computers or display taunting messages on the screen.
Because of this reputation, many of his friends no longer wanted to exchange floppy disks with him.
Skrenta thought of ways to alter floppy disks without touching or physically damaging them. During a winter break from Lebanon High School in Pennsylvania, Skrenta discovered how to automatically launch messages on his Apple II computer.
He developed what is now known as the boot sector virus, and began circulating it in early 1982 among high school classmates and a local computer club. Twenty-five years later, in 2007, Skrenta called it “a stupid practical joke.”
These were the years that marked the birth of viruses, Trojan horses (RATs), malicious software that later evolved to allow a user to An attacker attempting to gain persistent, unauthorized access to a victim’s computer over a network.
From then on, their use has become well-known: to trigger massive data breaches and attack large companies or inject other malware and payloads. Today, any kind of malware is available cheaply, used by everyone, from profit-driven criminals to espionage groups, major intelligence agencies, and their affiliates.
The malware industry moves millions of dollars every year, even though it all started with a simple, innocent game, “a stupid practical joke,” as Skrenta labeled it, like the first virus.
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