First computer virus

On this day in 1983, U.S. student Fred Cohen presented to a security seminar the results of his test - the first documented virus, created as an experiment in computer security. Cohen created this first virus when studying for a PhD at the University of Southern California. Others had written about the potential for creating pernicious programs but he was the first to demonstrate a working example. In the paper, he defined a virus as "a program that can 'infect' other programs by modifying them to include a ... version of itself". Cohen added his virus to a graphics program called VD, written for a Vax mini-computer. The virus hid inside VD and used the permissions users had to look at other parts of the Vax computer to spread around the system.
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