What Was The First Ever Cyber Security Suite?

A modern business computer system must be designed with security at the forefront. Using a dedicated IT services company will ensure that your company’s computer system has been designed with security in mind, giving your business the best possible chance to avoid malicious actors.

This was not always the case, of course. Microsoft Windows, up until the Trustworthy Computing initiative, was somewhat infamous for its lax security, which led to some of the biggest and most damaging virus attacks in the business world.

The business computer world largely began in the 1970s outside of mainframes and supercomputers, but it would take until 1987 for the first ever anti-virus software to be sold, and it took one of the most unusual, ambitious and enigmatic programmers who ever lived to bring it to market.

Battling The Brain

By some accounts, the first anti-virus software ever made was Reaper in 1972, a virus program designed to destroy another virus known as Creeper.

Creeper was a largely harmless virus by modern standards, designed simply to replicate itself to see how far it could spread across the ARPANET computer network, although it did slow down some early terminal systems.

A decade later, the first major virus infection, Brain, affected computers around the world in 1986. Whilst designed to protect a heart monitoring primarily sold from Pakistan, the Alvi brothers who developed the software and copy-protection system were inundated with phone calls demanding the software be removed.

At the same time, a bored programmer at Lockheed by the name of John McAfee found out about the Brain virus and realised that there was a market for a service that would remove viruses and restore the data of affected machines and disks as much as possible.

Initially, this took the form of a virus-busting “Anti-Virus paramedic unit” in a motor home that would travel to businesses across the United States to scan for “virus residue” on their computer from Brain.

Whilst initially a manual process, he would soon create a software package to automate the process, and McAfee VirusScan became the first-ever commercial anti-virus software package.

Making Money From Freebies

He adopted a somewhat unique approach to distributing VirusScan initially; it was available for free on Bulletin Board Systems (BBS), the rudimentary early internet of the 1980s, and home users could use the system without paying any fees.

This would inspire them to install it onto office computers and it was here that McAfee Associates would charge for installation and support. This system is common in the software world today but it was groundbreaking at the time.

Mr McAfee would make millions from VirusScan and the expanded computer security market he pioneered, but as quickly as he would rise as a leading light in the computer world, one interview would cause his reputation to unravel.

The Michelangelo Apocalypse

One of the most infamous chapters in the history of cybersecurity concerned the virus Michelangelo, a devastating boot sector virus that would activate on 6th March and make data irretrievable for average users.

It easily spread from disk to disk, and when some software manufacturers inadvertently shipped products infected with Michelangelo, it created a scare that would not be seen until the Millennium Bug.

At the centre of the public hysteria was John McAfee, the most public face of computer security, who was quoted as saying that the virus could wipe up to five million computers although, for the rest of his life, he would claim that this quote was taken out of context.

It led to a spike in sales of antivirus software and an ominous sense of foreboding leading up to the day, but the final estimate of computers affected on 6th March 1991 is believed to have been less than 10,000 in total.

Much like the Millennium Bug, there are two sides to the story.

The first is that the preparation worked and people were now far more aware of data security, developing antivirus habits that will ensure that their business is protected in the future.

The other, more cynical and much louder side believed that Mr McAfee had, at best, sensationalised the virus to sell more software, whilst others claimed that he and others in the anti-virus world had engineered the entire scare as a hoax.

Whilst his company would go public in 1992, he would step down a year later, his reputation affected by the furore surrounding Michelangelo, and he would become one of McAfee Associates’ loudest critics until he died in 2021.