last byte

Future Tense, one of the revolving features on this page, presents stories and essays from the intersection of computational science and technological speculation, their boundaries limited only by our ability to imagine what will and could be.

DOI: 10.1145/1897852.1897879
Gregory Benford
future tense
catch Me if you can
Or how to lose a billion in your spare time…

i enviSiOneD anD wrote the first computer virus in 1969 but failed to see that viruses would become widespread. Technologies don’t always evolve as we’d like. I learned this then but failed to catch the train I knew, even then, would soon leave the station. Further, I failed to see the levels of mistrust that would derive from malware generally. I also did not anticipate that seeds of mistrust could be blown by the gales of national rivalry through an Internet that would someday infiltrate every aspect of our lives.

At the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory I used the Advanced Research Projects Administration’s network, or ARPANet, to send brief messages to colleagues in other labs running over the big, central computers we worshipped then. However, ARPANet email had a potentially pernicious problem—“bad code” that could arise when researchers sent something new (maybe accidentally), possibly sending yet other things awry.

One day I thought maybe I could add such code intentionally, making a program that would copy itself deliberately. The biological analogy was obvious; evolution would favor it, especially if designed to use clever methods to hide itself and tap other programs’ energy (computing time) to further its own genetic ends.

So I wrote some simple code and sent it along in my next ARPANet transmission. Just a few lines in Fortran told the computer to attach them to programs being transmitted to a particular terminal. Soon it popped up in other programs and began propagating. By the next day it was in a lot of

otherwise unrelated code, so I wrote a memo, emphasizing to the mavens of the Main Computer that what I had done could likewise be done with considerably more malevolent intent. Moreover, viruses could move.

I avoided “credit” for the idea for
a long time but gradually realized
the virus-infection metaphor was in-
evitable, fairly obvious in fact. In the
early 1970s it surfaced again at Liver-
more when a self-replicating program
called Creeper infected ARPANet, just
printing on a user’s video screen “I’m
the creeper, catch me if you can!” In
response, users quickly wrote the first
antivirus program, called Reaper, to
erase Creeper. Various people rein-
vented the idea into the 1980s, when
a virus called Elk Cloner infected early
Apple computers. It was fixed quickly,
but Microsoft software proved more
vulnerable, and in 1986 a virus called
Brain started booting up with Mi-
crosoft’s disk operating system and
spread through floppy disks, stimulat-
ing creation of the antivirus industry I
had anticipated in 1970.