Today the PC virus celebrates its 20th Anniversary

The PC virus celebrates its 20th year of existence following the detection back in January '86 of the boot sector virus, Brain, which infected computers via floppy disk. While the virus Brain itself was relatively harmless, it set in motion a long chain of events leading up to today’s virus situation.

Boot sector viruses, now long extinct along with the floppy disk, held a relatively long reign from 1986 to 1995. Since transmission was via disk from computer to computer, infection would only reach a significant level months or even years after its release. This changed in 1995 with the development of macro viruses, which exploited vulnerabilities in the early Windows operating systems. For four years, macro viruses reigned over the IT world and propagation times shrank to around a month from the moment when the virus was found to when it was a global problem.