The PC virus celebrates its 25th birthday

“In January 1986, Basit and Amjad Alvi, sibling programmers living near the main train station in Lahore, Pakistan, wrote a piece of code to safeguard the latest version of their heart-monitoring software…

“But in the way of all emergent technologies, something entirely unintended happened. The Alvis’ wheel-clamp was soon copied by a certain stripe of computer hobbyist, who began to distribute it, concealed within various digital documents that people might be expected to want to open. Because almost all these booby-trapped files went out on floppy disks, the virus spread at a pre-Internet snail’s pace.
“Still, it did wreak a certain amount of low-grade havoc, freezing computers across the world.”

The piece of software, which the Alvis called Brain, is widely accepted as the first PC virus. Though, as the BBC pointed out on the 20th anniversary of Brain’s discovery, it wasn’t the first computer virus. That was on the Mac:

“Although Brain was the first PC virus, it was not the first malicious computer program. That honour goes to the Elk Cloner virus written by Richard Skrenta which infected Apple II machines.
“The term computer virus dates from 1984 and was coined by US computer scientist Fred Cohen.”

Another first for Apple, then, but probably not one to be proud of.
Anyway, while Gibson makes the Alvis’ actions sound quite benign, at the time they caused considerable panic. In 1988, Time magazine wrote a piece about the brothers that suggested they were “punishing” software pirates:

“…Amjad came up with the idea of creating a virus, a self- replicating program that would “infect” an unauthorized user’s computer, disrupt his operations and force him to contact Amjad for repairs. Says brother Basit: ‘He wanted a way to detect piracy, to catch someone who copies.’ Meanwhile, however, the Alvi brothers had started doing some copying of their own, making bootleg duplicates of American programs and selling them at steep discounts. Eventually, they started injecting the same virus into some of those program disks as well.”