A Brief History of Malware

The firstcomputer virus, called Elk Cloner, was discovered on a Mac in 1982.

In 1986, the first PC-based malware, known as Brain, was released.

As technologies standardized, certain types of malware proliferated.

By the late 1990s, viruses had begun impacting home users, with email propagation ramping up.

Since then, the number of malware attacks has grown exponentially, doubling or more each year.

Around this time,socially engineered wormsand spam proxies began to appear.