Brain (computer virus)

( c ) Brain (from antivirus vendors also referred to as a brain ) is considered the first computer virus for PCs. Its first version was written in January 1986. It infects the boot sector of floppy disks that have been formatted with the DOS FAT file system. The virus is also known under the name of Lahore, Pakistani, Pakistani Brain, Brain -A and UIUC. The Business Week magazine called it "the Pakistani flu ".

Description

( c ) Brain infects the computer by replacing the boot sector with a copy of itself. The actual boot sector is shifted to another sector, which is identified as defective. Infected disks usually have three kBytes bad sectors. The disk label is changed to " ( c ) Brain ," and the following text is found in infected boot sectors:

There are many smaller and larger variations of the text. The virus slows down the floppy disk drive and makes seven kilobytes of memory for DOS unavailable. ( c ) Brain was written by Basit Farooq Alvi two brothers Amjad Farooq Alvi and who lived in Charminar, Lahore, Pakistan. The brothers gave Time magazine compared to that they had written the virus to protect their medical software from copyright infringement, and it should only take copyright infringers.

( c ) Brain has a function to deal with disk partitions and avoids infecting hard disks by checking the bit with the highest value of the BIOS drive number. ( c ) Brain does not infect disks in which this bit is cleared. Other viruses at that time did not recognize any hard drives and consistently destroyed the data on the hard drive by they treated like floppy disks. ( c ) Brain was not because of his destructive behavior often remain undetected, especially not when the user paid no attention to the slow disk access.

The virus contained the address of the brothers, three phone numbers and a message telling the user that his system was infected and the brothers he should contact for removal:

The answer of the authors

When the brothers a large number of calls from people from the United States, Britain and elsewhere were that required them to clean their systems, the brothers were stunned and tried the outraged callers to explain that they had no evil intentions. Finally, they announced their telephone and regretted that they had published the contact details. The brothers are still in business in Pakistan with the Internet provider Brain Limited.

It is speculated that the brothers have written the virus to advertise for their operation.

Variants

Ashar is an older version of Brain., There are six variants in which the message text is different.