It was 25 years ago that this balding man, Amjad Farooq Alvi, then 24, and his brother Basat, 17, both based, of all places, in the unlikely tech hub of Lahore, created the first virus to hit the personal computer. Called © Brain, it spread like wildfire, igniting an inglorious era of crashing computers, lost data, millions of frustrated and bewildered computer users, and, of course, the $16.5-billion computer security industry.
"In the early days, virus writers were mostly young college students or geeks who wanted to prove their technical ability ... however, over time, they started smelling money in it and virus writing today is a big, underworld business," he says.
The Alvi brothers' virus was relatively harmless -- all it did was change the 'volume label' of the disk (essentially renaming it). But for the surprised and astonished user who was tech-savvy enough to dig deeper, the program also had a message hidden in it:
"Welcome to the Dungeon © 1986 Basit & Amjad (Pvt)Ltd BRAIN COMPUTER SERVICES 730 NIZAM BLOCK ALLAMA IQBAL
TOWN LAHORE-PAKISTAN PHONE: 430791,443248,280530.
Beware of this VIRUS.... Contact us for vaccination..."
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