2.1.AIDS Trojan, also called PC Cyborg, was the first ransomware
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International Journal of Communication Networks and Information Security (IJCNIS) Vol.On each infected system, it displayed a loving poem, "It
will get on all your disks; It will infiltrate your chips; Yes, it's
Cloner!" [14]. Basit and Amjad, two Pakistani brothers,
developed Brain Boot Sector Virus in 1986 to infect MS-DOS
computers, which was the first virus to infect the MS-DOS
system [15]. They designed this virus to test their company's
software and to prove that it was not a secure platform. This virus
was replicating with the help of a floppy disk. Authors designed
this virus to point out loopholes in their system rather than cause
damage or harm to the system. PCwrite Trojan was one of the
earliestTrojans designed in 1986 to erase all the user files once
affected [16]. It was spreading through a shareware program
called PC-Writer [17]. In 1988, Robert Tappan Morris, a graduate
student at Cornell, drafted a program that would check a computer
system's configuration to jump from one computer to another
utilizing UNIX's sendmail program and the Internet's SMTP
protocol [18]. It caused an increase in network traffic and
eventually caused the Internet to crash at that time. Morris was
arrested for creating this worm and convicted by the Computer
Fraud and Abuse Act from 1986 [19]. Stoned is a boot sector virus that appeared in 1987 and infected
floppy disks. It would sometimes display a message on the infected
machine upon startup that would read: "Your computer is now
stoned" [20].An accepted definition of a computer virus was
crafted by Fred Cohen to be "a program that can infect other
programs by modifying them to include a possibly evolved copy
of itself" [9]. Viruses can spread throughout a computer system or
network. The difference between viruses and worms is that a virus
usually requires human interference such as opening an infected
file to start replicating, whereas worms can replicate without an
intervention [10]. A common characteristic for malware in this
phase is that they do not try to remain hidden from the user. Most
would display a message or image on the computer's screen. The first instance of a worm was developed by Robert H Thomas
in 1971 and was called Creeper worm. It could move from one
system to another and display a message that read "I'm the
creeper: catch me if you can" [11].The mutation engine or Dark
Avenger Mutation Engine (DAME), a toolkit from Virus
Creation Laboratory, was the next innovative step in malware
evolution [25].Elk Cloner is one of the first epidemic self-replicating viruses
developed by a 15-year old named Richard Skrenta to infect
PCs.Early Phases of Malware Evolution (1949 - 1991)
Nowadays, malware is the most significant threat faced by the
modern digital world.John Von Neumann introduced the first virus as an
idea of "self-replicating string of code" in 1949. He designed
a "self-reproducing automata", which was able to transform a
new version by itself [8].