Some of tech event’s that happened On This Day brought to you by TEST Huddle; the Christmas virus spreads.
1987 – Christmas Virus Spread
The Christmas Virus finds its way onto BITNET, causing many mail servers to crash under the overload. The virus was a simple script that ran under the Rexx language and did two things: it drew a Christmas tree, using text for graphics, and then sent a copy of itself to everyone in the target’s email contacts list.
The virus originally started on Earn (the European Academic Research Network) and spread quickly to the US equivalent, Bitnet. After this the virus spread to IBM’s internal VNET. The virus lasted six days before it was removed by a complete shutdown of the entire network. The Christmas Virus will later be recognised as the first widely disruptive replicating network programme.
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