Engineering Education Blog: First documented experimental computer virus
by Alice Agogino
closeAuthor: Alice Agogino
Name: Alice Agogino
Email: agogino@berkeley.edu
Site: http://www.me.berkeley.edu/faculty/agogino/
About: Alice M. Agogino is the Roscoe and Elizabeth Hughes Professor of Mechanical Engineering and is affiliated faculty at the Haas School of Business in their Operations and Information Technology Management Group. Her research interests include: community-based design; sustainable engineering; intelligent learning systems; information retrieval and data mining; multiobjective and strategic product design; nonlinear optimization; probabilistic modeling; intelligent control and manufacturing; sensor validation, fusion and diagnostics; wireless sensor networks; multimedia and computer-aided design; design databases; design theory and methods; MEMS/NEMS synthesis and computer-aided design; artificial intelligence and decision and expert systems; and gender/ethnic equity.
She has served in a number of administrative positions at UC Berkeley, including Chair of the Faculty Senate, Associate Dean of Engineering and Faculty Assistant to the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost in Educational Development and Technology. Prof. Agogino also served as Director for Synthesis, an NSF-sponsored coalition of eight universities with the goal of reforming undergraduate engineering education, and continues as PI for the NEEDS (www.needs.org) and SMETE.ORG digital libraries of courseware in science, mathematics, engineering and technology.
Prof. Agogino received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of New Mexico (1975), M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering (1978) from the University of California at Berkeley and Ph.D. from the Department of Engineering-Economic Systems at Stanford University (1984). Prior to joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, she worked in industry for Dow Chemical, General Electric and SRI International. She has authored over 150 scholarly publications; has won numerous teaching, best paper and research awards; and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). At NAE she served on the Committee on Engineering Education, working on the Technologically Speaking and the Engineer 2020 projects. She is currently a member of the National Research Council's Board on Education and the Women in Academic Science Engineering Committee. She has supervised 66 MS projects/theses, 26 doctoral dissertations and numerous undergraduate researchers.See Authors Posts (122) · November 10th, 2007 · 2 Comments
Today in History - November 10, 1983 - Fred Cohen presented to a security seminar the results of his test on the first documented virus, created as an experiment in computer security.
The first virus in the wild was found earlier in 1981 on the Apple II, spread on floppy disks containing the operating system. The author of the Elk Cloner virus was Rich Skrenta, a ninth grade student at the time.
Created while he was studying for a PhD at the University of Southern California, Cohen was the first to demonstrate a working example on a computer system and present the results in a public forum. A year later, his research was published in a paper where he defined a virus as “a program that can ‘infect’ other programs by modifying them to include a … version of itself”.
This experiment in creating a hazard in order to prevent an even worse one provides an interesting case in computer privacy, security, responsibility and engineering ethics. A well designed virus can have a devastating effect on society, disrupting work, communications and causing billions of dollars in damages. Their success shows how interconnected human beings have become on the Internet and how dependent we have become on its stable operations. See the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on computer viruses and internet security. For more on related curricular programs and educational resources visit the Software Engineering Education, the Computer Science Education, the Information Systems Education or the Information Technology Education community sites.
Also on this day in history in 1903, Granville T. Woods, a famous black American inventor, received a patent for an “Electric Railway” (U.S. No. 729,481). Woods held numerous other patents relating to the electric railway, electrical devices, brakes, and telegraphy for railways.
Tags: Computer Science · Information Systems · Information Technology · Software Engineering
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