They have cost individuals, companies, and governments billions in software, security, data replacement, and lost productivity. Here are some of the most infamous viruses to date. ELK CLONER (1981) Richard Skrenta, a 15-year-old high school freshman, gave his friends some disks of computer games. But there was a catch: the disks could only be used 49 times. On the 50th attempt, the screen went blank and this poem appeared: It will get on all your disks. It will infiltrate your chips Yes it’s Cloner!It will stick to you like glue. It will modify RAM too Send in the Cloner! What was intended as a prank turned out to be the first computer virus. Elk Cloner would hide in the computer’s memory and then attach itself to the next disk inserted in the computer. Any other computer using that disk would then get infected in turn. Hundreds of computers were damaged, and Elk Cloner hung around for years. But Skrenta was never punished—viruses were so new that they were not yet perceived as the crimes they are today.
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