On that occasion, Fred Cohen, a graduate student at the University of Southern California, stood to give a demonstration that would forever change the concept of cybersecurity. In his hands was a small program, seemingly indistinguishable from any other, but it contained a revolutionary concept: an unprecedented ability to replicate and spread among computers. That historic moment marked the first documented appearance of what would later be known as a "computer virus."
With remarkable skill, Cohen inserted a malicious command line into the Unix system, and the astonishing spectacle began. In just five minutes, this new digital entity had taken control of a mainframe computer system, began replicating itself, and displayed a cryptic and intriguing message: "I am Creeper, catch me if you can."
Another stroke of genius came in the observation of supervising professor Leonard Adelman, who likened this self-replicating program to biological viruses, becoming the first to coin the term "computer virus" as we know it today.
This experimental virus wasn't inherently harmful; it served as an early warning. But after the seed Cohen showed the world, malicious trees soon sprouted. In the following 1980s, amateurs and early hackers began releasing their own viruses. Even before the term became popular, a teenager named Richard Skrenta used the "Elk Cloner" virus as a prank to infect his friends' computers.
Then, in 1986, Pakistani brothers Basit and Amjad Farooq Alvi came along and invented the "Brain" virus, the first widespread virus, which was transmitted via floppy disks and protected against information theft in a clever way.
Things became more complicated with the “Jerusalem” virus, which was discovered at the Hebrew University in 1987 and caused the first major losses in May 1988. This malicious virus infected executable files and deleted programs that ran on a particular day. It also infected “EXE” files repeatedly until they grew beyond the device’s capacity to withstand.
The phenomenon of "computer viruses" did not stop there from the beginning, as "Cascade" appeared as the first encrypted virus written in assembly language, and it caused the texts on the screen to stop, accompanied by music, which hindered work and led to data loss.
The most famous virus was called "Morris" and it spread in 1988. It is a spyware program that turned into a digital epidemic due to a coding error that made it send copies of itself to other devices on the ARPANET network, the pioneering network that preceded the Internet, causing massive infections that reached 10% of computers in the Netherlands, which prompted the authorities there to prepare special antivirus programs.
The worst was the “Trojan horse” virus that spread in 1989, which is considered the first ransomware virus in history. It infected the devices of scientists and medical researchers working to combat HIV, causing the loss of huge amounts of accumulated data on the response to the AIDS pandemic.
While these digital storms raged, Cohen waited on the sidelines, achieving the fame he sought and even exceeding his expectations. The topic of computer virus epidemics dominated newspaper and magazine pages, spawning comics, cartoons, and science fiction novels. Thanks to this media attention, Cohen became the first and foremost researcher on the problem of viruses.
In 1984, he proposed creating the first antivirus program, only to prove a bitter truth a few years later, in 1987: the impossibility of creating an algorithm that absolutely protects against all viruses.
It was the beginning of a journey that continues to this day, a journey that began with a modest academic presentation of a small program, no more than 512 bytes, but which carried the seeds of a massive digital transformation. From copyright protection to systematic destruction, from an innocent prank to organized crime, from a laboratory experiment to a global pandemic. On that day, the first computer virus was born, and with it, the world entered a new era of security challenges that continue to escalate and evolve, leaving behind a legacy of lessons in a world rapidly becoming entirely digital.