A Timeline of the Most Destructive and Notable Computer Viruses in History

How does a computer virus infect a system? Much like a biological virus, computer viruses spread and replicate from one host to another, infecting a large number of computers quickly and causing mayhem and destruction. Computer programmers use languages like C, C++, C#, Java, Perl, PHP and more to write computer programs, this code can also be used to create viruses with malicious intent. Creating a computer virus is not illegal, but if it causes harm to other systems, the person who created it may be held liable for damages. Some of the world’s most infamous and devastating computer viruses can be found here in a timeline from HP.

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Researchers agree that the first computer virus was circulated back in 1971. Called the Creeper virus, this program infected computers in a non-malicious way, simply putting a message up that said “I’m the creeper, catch me if you can.”

Computer viruses didn’t get big media attention until 1988 when the Morris worm was released causing over 228 million in damage in today’s money. In the early 2000’s when personal email was truly starting to take off, computer viruses exploded through mass-emailing schemes. The ILOVEYOU virus (released in 2000) was a fake love letter that would send itself to every contact in a person’s email list once opened. In 2001, a virus called KLEZ was estimated to infect over 7% of the computers in the entire world by sending fake emails and tricking victims into opening them by pretending to be trusted senders. It caused over 48 billion dollars in damage after inflation making it the 2nd most destructive virus on this timeline.