I decided to start a YouTube series on the History of Malware and the first video was published today.
In this episode we’ll take a look at where malware began. We’ll discuss the first theoretical works by John von Neumann, the origins of the terms ‘virus’ and ‘worm’ in relation to malware and the early experiments in distributed computation that gave birth to the first computer worms. If you’d like to learn more about the subjects, you may find links for the relevant sources under the video.
John von Neumann - The General and Logical Theory of Automata
http://physics.bu.edu/~pankajm/PY571/HixonsymposiumVonNeumaan.pdf
John von Neumann - Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata
http://www.arise.mae.usp.br/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Theory-of-self-reproducing-automata.pdf
https://archive.org/details/theoryofselfrepr00vonn_0/mode/2up
Lionel Penrose - Self-Reproducing Machines
http://fab.cba.mit.edu/classes/865.18/replication/Penrose.pdf
https://wellcomelibrary.org/item/b20219222
Frederick G. Stahl - 1960 – the first artificial universe complex artificial life in a Darwinian world
http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2017/02/102724826-05-01-acc.pdf
M. D. McIlroy, R. Morris, V. A. Vyssotsky - Letter to C. A. Lang about Darwin
https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/darwin.pdf
The Jargon File 4.2.2
https://vanderworp.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/jargon.pdf
Fork bombs - Wikia
https://malware.wikia.org/wiki/Fork_Bomb
Numberphile - Does John Conway hate his Game of Life?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8kUJL04ELA
Gregory Benford - The Scared Man
http://www.gregorybenford.com/extra/the-scarred-man-returns/
Jordan Spencer Cunningham - Q&A with Ray Tomlinson on Creeper “Virus”
https://nerdology.org/2014/11/qa-with-ray-tomlinson-on-creeper/
Veith Risak - Selbstreproduzierende Automaten mit minimaler Informationsübertragung
https://web.archive.org/web/20080305093506/http://www.cosy.sbg.ac.at/~risak/bilder/selbstrep.html
Cicatrix - Interview with Q The Misanthrope
http://web.archive.org/web/20080406223546/http:/vx.netlux.org/lib/static/vdat/ivqmisan.htm
Peter G. Neumann - The Risk Digest Volume 6 Issue 53
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/6.53.html#subj4
John Walker - The Animal Episode
https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/univac/animal.html
PARC History
https://web.archive.org/web/20070711093550/http://www.parc.xerox.com/about/history/default.html
John F. Shoch and Jon A. Hupp - The "Worm" Programs Early Experience with a Distributed Computation
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.137.9511&rep=rep1&type=pdf