There is no good malware: Part 2.

Before I begin, did you read Part 1 that was published 2 days ago? Because if not, now would be a good time to, and you can find it here. So go read it, I'll wait.


Got it? Good

Sony was not the first case of a company attempting to stop software piracy by use of malware. And I certainly wish that whoever thought to place rootkits on CDs would have looked back and saw that someone already tried something like that. I speak of a virus that is considered by many to be the first virus for MS-DOS. So we are going back quite a ways, back to January 1986. This virus, called Brain, infected the boot sector of storage media formatted with the DOS FAT file system.

The virus was only meant to target those that infringed copyright.

This virus was written by two brothers in an attempt to protect their medical software from piracy. Brain affected MS-DOS by replacing the boot sector of a floppy disk with a copy of the virus. The real boot sector is moved to another sector and marked as bad. The disk label is changed to ©Brain, and the following text can be seen in infected boot sectors:

"Welcome to the Dungeon (c) 1986 Brain & Amjads (pvt) Ltd VIRUS_SHOE RECORD V9.0 Dedicated to the dynamic memories of millions of viruses who are no longer with us today - Thanks GOODNESS!! BEWARE OF THE er..VIRUS : this program is catching program follows after these messages" 

The virus was only meant to target those that infringed copyright. So when the brothers began to receive a large number of phone calls from users from around the world demanding that they disinfect their machines, the two brothers were stunned and attempted to explain to outraged callers that their intention had not been malicious.

Thank You for reading. As always, I invite readers to comment below with any questions or comments. And if you were a user infected with Brain, I even more so invite you to comment and share your story, should you be able to recall.