Plants vs. Zombies: The Brain, the Most Thoughtful Virus →

1. Prophecy

Xiaobai: Oh, genuine software is so expensive!

Dadong: Haha, of course.

Xiaobai: Hey, Brother Dong, do you have a shortcut that you can lend me to copy?

Dadong: This is not good, right? Although you have to pay for genuine software, protecting intellectual property rights is something everyone should do consciously, and genuine software can guarantee safety! But there are precedents of "adding ingredients" to software.

Xiaobai: Eh? I seem to smell the scent of knowledge...

2. Talking about the incident

Plants vs. Zombies (Picture from the Internet)

Xiaobai: Brother Dong, don't keep me in suspense. What did you want to say? What "additional ingredients"?

Dadong: Today I will tell you about a virus that is created to protect software from being copied illegally.

Xiaobai: Tell me quickly!

Dadong: In 1986, a pair of Pakistani brothers ran a store selling personal computers. Since the trend of software piracy was very prevalent in the local area, their main purpose was to prevent their software from being copied at will. As long as someone copied their software, C-BRAIN would attack and eat up the remaining space on the hard drive of the piracy. This is the famous Brain virus.

Xiaobai: Brain virus... sounds like Plants vs. Zombies?!

Dadong: This virus was a DOS-attacking virus, and it can be said to be the ancestor of computer viruses. At that time, this program was spread all over the world via floppy disks.

Xiaobai: All over the world!

3. The whole story of the big talk

Xiaobai: Brain virus, the name sounds like it is specifically for storage.

Dadong: Almost. Brain was the first known invisible virus. In the 1980s, computer hard disks were so small that they were almost non-existent, and almost everything needed floppy disks as a medium to be saved. The Brain virus could disguise itself well on floppy disks and infect the computer when it was inserted into the computer. In this way, the virus was copied to the computer's memory and affected the next new floppy disk that was inserted. "Brain" was not spread through the Internet like it is now, but spread through floppy disks that have now become history, and it was spread all over the world.

Xiaobai: Haha, I never thought that the virus was spread to the whole world through airplanes, ferries and other means of transportation. I just said that it is an invisible virus...

Dadong: The Brain virus is not completely invisible. All infected floppy disks will rename their startup items to Brain. As long as computer users list all the file items, they can easily find out whether their floppy disks are infected.

Xiaobai: Isn’t that very noobish?

Dadong: This virus was not very lethal at the time, but later some people with ulterior motives used C-BRAIN as a blueprint to create some deformed viruses. Other new virus creations also emerged, not only by individuals, but also by many creation groups. Various anti-virus, anti-virus and anti-virus software and professional companies also emerged. For a time, various virus creations and anti-virus programs were constantly being innovated, like a hundred schools of thought contending.

Xiaobai: The fight between masters is the most deadly!

Dadong: The main purpose of the Brain virus is to prevent their software from being copied arbitrarily. If the disk program is pirated, the boot sector will be replaced by an infected boot sector, occupying valuable memory resources, slowing down the disk, and sometimes preventing users from saving. It is also the first virus to target DoS attacks.

Xiaobai: DoS attack? I've heard a little about this. Brother Dong, tell me more about it!

DoS attack (picture from the Internet)

Dadong: DoS is the abbreviation of Denial of Service, which means denial of service. The attack behavior that causes DoS is called DoS attack, and its purpose is to make the computer or network unable to provide normal services. The most common DoS attacks include computer network broadband attacks and connectivity attacks, which deliberately attack the defects of network protocol implementation or use brutal means to cruelly exhaust the resources of the attacked object, with the purpose of making the target computer or network unable to provide normal services or resource access, causing the target system service system to stop responding or even crash. However, this attack does not include intrusion into the target server or target network equipment.

Xiaobai: So cruel?

Dadong: These service resources include network bandwidth, file system space capacity, open processes or allowed connections. This kind of attack will lead to resource scarcity. No matter how fast the computer's processing speed is, how large the memory capacity is, or how fast the network bandwidth is, the consequences of this attack cannot be avoided.

Xiaobai: Brain virus is so scary?!

Dadong: The Brain virus uses this attack method. It will replace the boot track in the floppy disk on the IBM PC with its own program. The original boot track will be moved to another track and marked as a bad track. The infected floppy disk usually has a 5KB bad track.

4. Xiaobai's inner thoughts

Say no to piracy (Picture from the Internet)

Xiaobai: After listening to what Brother Dong said, I decided to buy the genuine software.

Dadong: Don’t be so reluctant, you should have a good sense of copyright!

Xiaobai: Well, it’s not much money actually. It’s good for both others and myself.

Dadong: Oh, Xiaobai can realize this, which means today’s lesson was not in vain. As a teacher, I am very pleased!

Xiaobai: It’s true, this Brain virus has a lot of bad records, but we can’t deny it completely.

Dadong: No, to this day, people still argue about the reason why the two brothers created the virus, but it is obvious that they wanted to stop the spread of illegal software, which is a pirate-like plundering behavior. However, their behavior that damages computer security is not encouraged!