Farooq alvi brothers virus

Before vigilante hackers like Anonymous tamed the Internet, two brothers started their own fight against software piracy. Their weapon: the first PC virus. In , students at the University of Delaware began experiencing strange symptoms: temporary memory loss, a lethargic drive, and fits of rage. Known as Brain, the bug destroyed memory, slowed the hard drive, and hid a short copyright message in the boot sector, introducing the world to two soon-to-be hacker celebrities.

At the time, coders Basit and Amjad Farooq Alvi were just 17 and 24, respectively, running a computer store in Lahore, Pakistan. Nevertheless, they never expected that the first phone call would come from the United States, nor that the virus would spread to various parts of the world. The Morris Worm, sometimes also called the Internet Worm, entered the history books as the first computer worm that was distributed over the Internet and that compromised thousands of computers, drawing massive media attention in the process.

Back then, the Internet consisted of approximately 60, machines, some 6, of which were infected by the worm. It comprised 99 lines of code and, of course, had the ability to replicate and propagate itself. It became a dangerous threat due to a flaw in its propagation mechanism, having eventually infected thousands of computers at universities, in government laboratories, as well as in companies.

Besides the damage that it caused, the worm also exposed many security weaknesses , revealing the need for reviewing password protection procedures, among other measures.

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By Usama Javed. Early Life Born on 10 August, in Lahore, in a well-educated family. Education After completing his intermediate Amjad Farooq Alvi joined University of the Punjab to pursue professional education. Latest news. The new cricket league from the beautiful valley of Kashmir is something of a marvel itself. Basit and Amjad never thought of the virus growing into a global-sized monster, with powers beyond their capacities to control it.

Source by Avinash Meetoo. They realized how widespread their virus had become when they heard the angry voices of people from the UK and the US calling their store with demands for the brothers to disinfect their machines. The brothers claim that the virus was intended to be mostly harmless, simply displaying a copyright message about the pirated software and changing the name of the floppy drive, however, many people reported that the virus has viped data or caused their drives to become slow and unresponsive.