TOP 20 VIRUSES IN THE HISTORY :

1. CREEPER (1971) first worm program ran on a DEC 10 computer under the TOPS TEN operating system.

2. ELK CLONER (1985) first personal computer virus, on the Apple IIe. This was created by a 9th grader

3. THE INTERNET WORM (1985) written by a person at Cornell University which brought the Internet to a standstill.

4. PAKISTANI BRAIN (1988) first virus to infect the IBM PC, written by two brothers from Pakistan. This was the first virus widely covered by the media, although viruses were already well known in Science Fiction.

5. JERUSALEM FAMILY (1990) About fifty different strains of this virus, believed to have come from the University of Jerusalem

6. STONED (1989) the most widespread virus in the first decade of viruses; stoned was a boot sector/.mbr infector that would count the number of reboots from its original infection and display the phrase “your computer is now stoned”

7. DARK AVENGER MUTATION ENGINE (1990) was actually written in 1988, but was only first used in the early nineties in viruses like POGUE and COFFEESHOP. This Mutation Engine was the first real Polymorphism put into use in the wild, and changed virus work forever.

8. MICHEANGELO (1992) a variant of STONED, with a destructive payload. On March 6th, this virus will erase the first 100 sectors of a hard drive, rendering it useless.

9. WORLD CONCEPT (1995) the first Microsoft Word Macro virus in the wild, Word Concept would enter the phrase, “That’s enough to prove my point” This launched the second era of computer viruses, and was important in that it brought computer viruses to a much less skilled level of hacker

10. CIH/CHERNOBYL (1998) The Chernobyl virus was the most destructive virus ever seen, up to it’s time. Hitting on the 26th of any month (depending on the version involved), it would both erase the hard drive, and wipe out the flash ROM BIOS of the computer in question.

11. MELISSA (1999) the first major virus to spread via email, and really the beginning of the Internet virus era. Although Melissa was non destructive, it was disruptive in the fact that it would both replicate and fill email boxes wherever it went.

12. LOVEBUG (2001) the most popular email worm ever, driven purely by social engineering

13. Code RED (2001) named for a popular high caffeine soft drink, this network virus spread without either email or webpage. It located vulnerable computers and infected them all on it’s own.

14. NIMDA (2001). Dubbed “the Swiss Army Knife” of viruses, it used buffer overflows, email, network shares, and ten other methods to gain entry to a network.

15. BAGEL/NETSKY (2004) were viruses designed to demonstrate a fake competition, or war with each other. With hundreds of versions each, and varying amounts of new technology and success, these two worms stayed in the news virtually the entire year.

16. BOTNETS (2004) these zombie warriors of the internet provide Cybercriminals with an endless collection of infected computers that can be reconfigured in networks to forward spam, infecting new people, stealing data—they allow the bad guys to use.

17. ZOTOB (2005) this worm only affected unpatched windows 2000 systems, but managed to take out several major media sites, including CNN and the New York Times

18. ROOTKITS (2005) they have become one of the most popular stealth tools in the world of malicious code. It is used to make other malware invisible by warping the operating system.

19. STORM WORM (2007) the virus went through thousands of iterations, eventually creating the world’s largest botnet. At one time it was believed that more than fifteen million machines were infected at the same time, and in the control of the criminal underworld.

20. ITALIAN JOB (2007) rather than a single piece of malware, the Italian Job was a coordinated attack using a prepackaged tool kit known as MPACK. It involved corrupting more than ten thousand websites, causing them to plant modern Data Stealing Malware.