Which was the first Windows virus? Which was the first AntiVirus?

While searching for information about WinVer, the first Windows virus, I came across an interesting article about the history of virus and antivirus.

Which was the first Windows Virus

In 1986, the first MS-DOS PC virus was created. It was the Brain virus from Pakistan. Brain was a boot sector virus and only infected 360k floppy disks. Interestingly, even though it was the first virus, it had full-stealth capability.

Stoned was the first MBR infector and was written by a student at the University of Wellington in New Zealand.

Several innovative viruses appeared in 1992:

• EXEBug introduced CMOS modification to prevent clean booting.
• Groove was the first .EXE infecting MtE virus. It also targeted many anti-virus products.
• Invol was the first .SYS infector. It was also slightly polymorphic.
• Starship was a SPM, slow infector. It also introduced a new way to infect the hard drive.
• V-Sign was the first polymorphic boot sector virus.
• WinVer 1.4 was the first Windows virus.

WinVer was Windows-specific. VLAD was probably the first one to specifically target Windows 95 systems.

Read: Evolution of malware.

Which was the first AntiVirus

There are competing claims for the innovator of the first antivirus product. Possibly the first publicly documented removal of a computer virus in the wild was performed by Bernd Fix in 1987.

By the end of 1990 there were a number of anti-virus products available.

• AntiVirus Plus from Iris
• Certus from Certus International
• Data Physician from Digital Dispatch
• Turbo Antivirus from Carmel
• Virex-PC from Microcom
• Virucide (McAfee's Pro-Scan) from Parsons
• Virusafe from Elia Shim
• ViruScan from McAfee
• Dr. Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit from S&S
• F-Prot from Frisk Software
• ThunderByte from ESaSS
• Vaccine from Sophos
• Vaccine from World Wide Data
• V-Analyst from BRM
• Vet from Cybec
• VirusBuster from Hunix
• Virscan from IBM
• Vi-Spy from RG Software

One other product appeared in December of 1990. Its release foreshadowed a new direction the antivirus industry would take in 1991.

The product was Norton AntiVirus!