20 years later: A real life horror story

It sounds like a line from a movie trailer, read out by the voice-over actor with the distinctively gravely voice who seems to be on a studio retainer to advertise any film with a sinister edge.

"It started as a high school experiment... they never meant it to get out of the lab..."

You can even picture the opening sequence, bespectacled boffin type proclaims: "I've done it - I've created a computer virus."

Cut to "20 years later..." caption - and the world is in tatters...

OK, so the world isn't quite in tatters, but the computer virus has reached 20 years of age and while its infancy was fairly inoffensive its adolescence and late teen years have not been pretty.

From a simple proof of concept science project in 1983, the computer virus has become a multi-billion-dollar phenomenon within 20 years.

Nobody doubts the intentions of computing student Fred Cohen. He was merely testing a hypothesis - but like many scientists, to steal a phrase from Jurassic Park which we've used more than once before in the past, he was "so preoccupied with whether or not [he] could, [he] didn't stop to think if [he] should".

Of course if Cohen hadn't done it somebody else would and they would have gained his course credits.

Real life viruses often start in a lab as proof of concept or under the proviso that they will be examined within a controlled environment but experience has told us that it's not just in the movies that things can go wrong.

So too did Cohen's experiment have terrible consequences. From Brain, to Tequila, to Concept, to Melissa, to Kournikova, to Love Bug, to MSBlast, to SoBig... the chain of computer viruses became a who's who of malware queued up to damage your network.

And even if this was some horror B-movie don't even start thinking about settling in and waiting for the happy ending - because there isn't going to be one.

The virus writers will continue to innovate and the anti-virus vendors will continue to keep pace. There will be victories along the way but the problem is not going to go disappear altogether. We have to ensure we all do what we can to keep viruses under control.

Next year the computer virus will be 21. All you can do is make sure it won't be holding its party on your premises.