The Founders of the Brain Virus--The Young Brothers of Lahore in 1986 and the Warning of the Dawn of the PC

The Founders of the Brain Virus--The Young Brothers of Lahore in 1986 and the Warning of the Dawn of the PC

In 1986, when personal computers were still in their infancy, Amjad Farrokh Alvi, then 24, and his younger brother Basit Farrokh Alvi, then 17, of Lahore, Pakistan, ran a small medical software company for IBM PC compatible machines. IBM PC compatible machines. They were fed up with the piracy of their software and wrote a code called "Brain" as a means of preventing its unauthorized use. It was later called "the world's first PC virus.

There were several noteworthy technical and social factors at the time. First, in the mid-1980s, the concept of security was still undeveloped in the PC environment. The term "computer virus" itself was just beginning to appear in the academic world, and the general public was largely unaware of the topic. Moreover, it was the era of the "sneakernet," when viruses spread only through floppy disks, so their speed of spread depended on human mobility.

Amjad and Basit clearly marked the Brain virus with their company name, address, and telephone number. In other words, it was unique in that they proudly called themselves despite the fact that it was a virus. The screen displayed "BRAIN COMPUTER SERVICES, 730 NIZAM BLOCK, ALLAMA IQBAL TOWN, LAHORE-PAKISTAN," etc., and the message "Beware of the virus. Contact us about vaccines," the message would appear. This would be considered a crime today, but at the time, it was made with the awareness that it was rather a kind of copyright protection.

The virus had a mechanism to infect the boot sector of a floppy disk and spread it to others without the user's intention. As a result, Brain eventually circled the globe, and Amjad and Basit's names are now etched in the history of cybersecurity. Their ethical argument that "copying software for free is dishonest" became unexpectedly influential in that their methods formed the prototype for later malware.

The emergence of Brain was not just a technological anecdote, but also an incident that symbolized the ambiguity of cyber ethics and the underdevelopment of international information security. The Brain was not just a technological anecdote.

Thus, the birth of the Brain virus is remembered as an episode that reflected the technological innocence and ethical chaos of the mid-1980s and heralded the dawn of the malware era that continues to this day.