This Throwback Thursday VB heads back to 1996 when VB published a report on the state of viruses on the Internet.
In the mid-1990s, long before the days of driveby downloads and exploit kits, the main source of viruses on the Internet was virus sites – indeed, in 1995, the NCSA, together with a number of anti-virus companies, sponsored a ”
let’s get rid of Internet virus sites!
” campaign.
When, in 1996, Sarah Gordon started to research an article for
Virus Bulletin
she found 2,000 matches on the Internet for ‘computer’ and ‘virus’ (or ‘virii’, as their distributors were fond of calling them).
In the August 1996 issue of
Virus Bulletin
, Sarah presented the results of her research into viruses on the Internet, predicting that our increased reliance on the Internet for communication, and the retrieval of information from untrusted systems, would bring more cases of point-and-click giving users new viruses of many types, including those which take advantage of existing security holes in insecure applications.
The full report can be read
here
in HTML format or downloaded
here
as a PDF.
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