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Linux Viruses and Such
Malware Timeline:
1949: John von Neumann invented the concept of self-reproducing automata.
1969 onwards: Ken Thompson built into binaries of the original C compiler a backdoor for the UNIX login program, for his own convenience. No amount of source checking could find it, and it was still undetected when he revealed it in his 1983 Turing Award lecture.
1972: Novel “When HARLIE Was One” by David Gerrold had a fictional program called VIRUS, which was a war dialer that “injects itself into the new computer”.
early 1970s: Bob Thomas at BB&N created the Creeper program, which traveled from computer to computer within the network, then the Reaper program to hunt it down and kill it.
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