Elk Cloner is one of the first known
microcomputer viruses that spread "in the wild," i.e., outside the computer system or lab in which it was written.
[1][2][3][4] It was written around 1982 by a 15-year-old high school student named
Rich Skrenta for
Apple II systems.
Infection and symptoms
Elk Cloner spread by infecting the
Apple II operating system using a technique now known as a "
boot sector" virus. If a computer
booted from an infected
floppy disk, a copy of the virus was placed in the computer's
memory.
When an uninfected disk was inserted into the computer, Elk Cloner
would be copied to the disk, allowing it to spread from disk to disk.
[5]
An infected computer would display a short
poem on every 50th boot:
Elk Cloner: The program with a personality
It will get on all your disks
It will infiltrate your chips
Yes, it's Cloner!
It will stick to you like glue
It will modify RAM too
Send in the Cloner!
Elk Cloner did not cause deliberate harm, but
Apple DOS disks without a standard image had their reserved tracks overwritten.
[6]
Development
Elk Cloner was created in 1981 by
Rich Skrenta,
a 15-year-old high school student. Skrenta was already distrusted by
his friends because, in sharing computer games and software, he would
often alter the floppy disks to shut down or display taunting on-screen
messages. Because his friends no longer trusted his disks, Skrenta
thought of methods to alter floppy disks without physically touching
them. During a winter break from the
Mt. Lebanon High School in
Pennsylvania,
United States, Skrenta discovered how to launch the messages automatically on his
Apple II computer. He developed what is now known as a
boot sector
virus, and began circulating it in early 1982 among high school friends
and a local computer club. 25 years later in 2007, Skrenta called it
"some dumb little practical joke."
[7][8][9]
Distribution
According to contemporary reports, the virus was rather contagious,
successfully infecting the floppies of most people Skrenta knew, and
upsetting many of them.
[citation needed] Part of the "success," of course, was that people were not at all wary of the potential problem, nor were
virus scanners or cleaners available. The virus could still be removed, but it required an elaborate manual effort.
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