In Pictures: 20 notorious worms, viruses and botnets

The earliest worms and viruses were created for geeky fun and did little harm - oh, how times have changed. Here are 20 worms, viruses and botnets that show the evolution of malware, from Creeper to Flame.

Creeper

The first real computer virus, Creeper was released "in lab" in 1971 by an employee of a company working on building ARPANET, the Internet’s ancestor, according to Guillaume Lovet, Senior Director, FortiGuard Labs.

The Creeper looked for a machine on the network, transferred to it, displayed the message “I’m the creeper, catch me if you can!” and started over, thereby hopping from system to system.

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