History of Computer Viruses and Worms

Members

Project Proposal

We want to do a paper on the history of computer viruses and worms. Because we have relatively no knowledge in this area and because the topic sounded interesting we decided to gather information about this. We hope to define what a virus / worm is and trace its history back to its roots. We will come up with a rough chronology of the different types of viruses that have evolved over the years. We will outline the different ways viruses penetrate a system and in what ways they modify or access data on other machines.

Some of the sources we have come up with so far include papers, websites, and textbooks. The textbook we are using is called "Viruses, Worms, and Trojan Horses". We found several excellent websites.
Virus library: http://www.gallery.uunet.be/ewillems/encyclo.htm
Virus Research: http://www2/spidernet.net/web/~cvrl/link01.htm
Virus Resources: http://www.cert.org/other_sources/viruses.html
Here are a few relevant papers:
"Computer Viruses", Peter Denning; American Scientist, Mar. 1989.
"The Internet Worm Program: An Analysis", Eugene Spafford; Purdue Techincal Report, Nov. 1988.
"Computer Security: Infiltrating Open Systems", I. Witten; Abacus, Summer 1987.

Send email to bishop@cs.ucdavis.edu.

Department of Computer Science
University of California at Davis
Davis, CA 95616-8562

Page last modified on 04/18/2000