Computer viruses are self-replicating programs that can damage machines, replicate themselves, and infect new host computers thereby imitating biological viruses.

The speculative theory that a computer virus could be created was first published in 1966 by a mathematician named John von Neumann in his Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata.

Then in 1971 what is generally considered the first virus program was unleased by programmer Bob Thomas of BBN (Bold, Beranek, and Newman, now Raytheon BBN Technologies). He named it Creeper after a Scooby-Doo cartoon character. It did nothing more than display on the screen “I’m the creeper, catch me if you can”. After displaying the message on the screen, its instructions were to find another computer on the network of machines, transfer itself to the other machine, and run itself on the other machine. It wasn’t much and it wasn’t deliberately malicious but it was the first demonstration that a program can automatically move from one computer to another.

Following the success of Creeper, one of Tom’s colleagues, Ray Tomlinson, created the first antivirus program, The Reaper, which moved from one computer to another automatically and looked for a copy of the Creeper program and got rid of it.

Thus was the beginning of an epic battle between good and evil that is playing out today more than ever.

The threat has morphed into what we now term Malicious software or Malware for short. It consists of all types of malicious programs including viruses, adware, spyware, ransomware, key loggers that monitor the keyboard keystrokes and therefore your passwords, spam that links one to malicious sites, and RATs (Remote Access Trojans) which grant an attacker complete access to the computer system including modifying system settings, injecting malicious code, and the ability to turn on your camera and record. There are many types of malware.

According to dataprot.net, “There are now more than 1 billion malware programs out there…and Trojans account for 58% of them…and almost half (46%) of hackers…deliver it almost exclusively through email.

Beware

Of

RATS

Remote

Access

Trojans

AV-Test.org is an independent research institute for IT security. For more than 15 years, these experts have guaranteed quality-assuring comparison and tests of virtually all internationally relevant IT security products.

Av-Test agrees that there are now over 1 billion malware on the Internet, the red in the chart. The other, Potentially Unwanted Applications (PUA) is a category of software that can cause your machine to run slowly, display unexpected ads, or worse they may “ET Phone Home” and invite their bad friends to install other software which may be more harmful or annoying.

Again, according to dataprot.net, 45% of organizations affected by ransomware attacks in 2019 chose to pay the ransom, and half of them still lost their data. Over 10 Billion Euros was paid in ransom.

Then in 2021 Cisco reported “In the last year, cyber criminals delivered a wave of cyber attacks that were not just highly coordinated, but far more frequent and advanced than ever before seen.”

If you don’t have an anti-malware program on your computer you are at risk. To protect your data I recommend that you buy an automatic online backup program like Carbonite and an Anti-Malware program.

Anti-VIrus today: According to Computer Knowledge (cknow.com), “there are well over 100,000 known computer viruses…Only a small percentage of this total number account for those viruses found in the wild”.
Most of these viruses are stopped by all popular antivirus programs including the built-in Windows protection, Microsoft Defender, but for the best protection from viruses you need Bitdefender. This award winning antivirus is trusted by over 30 million users. AV Test awarded it TOP Product in 2022; Virus Bulletin gave it a 100% perfect score against Malware. It works on your laptop, Desktop, smartphone, and tablet. Bitdefender is all you need.
The real scourge of the Internet today is Malware. There are many Anti-Malware products to combat this problem, but with over a billion to fight off and an ever increasing variety I recommend that you get Bitdefender to guard your computer. I used to recommend HitmanPro.alert to protect against Malware and it is still a good choice but Bitdefender has matured to a better even award winning program that protects against both viruses and malware and it is now my number one recommendation.