A worm in your inbox: 25 years of the computer virus
A stressed e-mail from a friend once read: "A worm has just eaten my kid!"
Thankfully, the message was not referring to infanticidal earthworms, but rather to a type of computer virus, a "worm", that had just infected some files (known as KID files) on his computer. And he may have had Fred Cohen to thank for the ensuing implosion of his computer hard-drive.
Mr Cohen released the very first computer virus in a controlled experiment in a class at the University of Southern California, 25 years ago today. In 1983, in a class at the School of Engineering taught by the computer-programming guru Leonard Adleman, Mr Cohen wrote a program for a parasitic application that seized control of computer operations.
