The First Amiga Virus - Something Wonderful Has Happened

In 1987 C64 and Amiga Cracking and Scene group SCA (Swiss Cracking Association) would release the first ever Amiga home computer virus after being challenged to see if it were even possible. It's impact on the Amiga and home computers had wide ramifications. In today's episode we take a close look at SCA and how the virus became a part of scene and Amiga history.

Sources :

Music Credits:

► Marshes | Agony [Amiga] | Original Soundtrack - Martin Iveson, Robert Ling, Martin Wall, Alister Brimble, Matthew Simmons
► Loading: The Forest | Agony [Amiga] | Original Soundtrack - Martin Iveson, Robert Ling, Martin Wall, Alister Brimble, Matthew Simmons

Chapters:

00:00:00 - Intro
00:02:21 - Sponsor
00:03:56 - Origins of the first PC Virus
00:06:12 - How the SCA Virus works
00:09:26 - Fallout from the Virus
00:14:37 - SCA Today
00:16:26 - Conclusion

Social Media Links :

#SCA #Virus #Amiga

[neuroflare]

"I never wanted to destroy any software." Updating it to defeat protections and mitigations sure puts the lie to that line.

[fitfogey]

I was a newbie IT guy in a hospital in the mid 90s. We got hit with the one half virus in Windows for Workgroups 3.11. It was devastating. The pc’s would try and boot and got the message “dis is one half” and couldn’t do anything else. All you could do was scrub the machine. It brought an 8 floor hospital to its knees. Crazy times for sure. Do a search for that virus. It was crazy.

[Waccoon]

"Write protection"

One of the things I really, really miss from the old days. Every flash device should have a write protect switch, including firmware!

[amaruqlonewolf]

"It was never meant to cause harm" and I call that entirely BS. Constantly updating the virus so it can avoid detection, how's that NOT malicious?

[KahnShawnery]

Around '91 my friend had an Amiga. We would copy disks sent to us from European hacker groups. His Amiga randomly started printing BEER on the screen in a variety of fonts and colors upon booting up. We would have to reboot when that happened. It wasn't every boot, just sometimes. We suspected it came from a demo disk, probably the ACID demo.

[acerimmer]

9:08 "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."

[mrhaftbar]

When i got an amiga in 1989, a friend told me never to leave disks write enabled.

[SimonRockman]

I first encountered this Amiga virus in the late 1980s. I was working on Amiga Computing magazine in the UK, and saw it on a friend's Amiga. I was intrigued, I'd never heard of a virus before, so as a journalist I tried to sell the story. I offered it to Popular Computing Weekly and The Guardian. Jack Schofield, the Guardian Tech editor was skeptical and said he'd only run it if Pop Comp, did. They didn't so Jack demurred. The next week Pop Comp ran my story on the front page, so Jack took the story. I believe that it was the first ever story on computer viruses to appear in a British national newspaper.

[Phryj]

Funny story: the first time I saw the Your Amiga is Alive message was like right after I'd seen Pulse and Maximum Overdrive, 2 horror movies about machines coming alive and killing people. Needless to say, I was pretty much terrified out of my then 9 year old mind.

[williamwright]

I remember getting the virus in New Zealand circa 1991, It was real spooky I thought the Amiga had come to life!

[MotoCat]

11:00 "no it doesn't stand for the other thing" lol, almost missed that

[HoroJoga]

Hey MVG, I didn't grow up with the Amiga, but I think there's a lot of people who want to know more abour its games. It'd be nice if you made a video of the better games on the system and current emulators to enjoy them. Cheers!

[lukasgruber]

I loved how the virus killer back then only knew a hand full of viruses. but made those feel special. The program had a fancy graphical UI and each virus when detected had its own graphical representation with a nice hand drawn pixel art where the artist imagined some kind of organic virus in digital form. It was a challenge among us to find and trade new viruses to "unlock" all the images the virus killer had to offer.

[UnitSeen]

"I didn't mean to destroy any software so I just made my program erase data on disks."

[OM_MO]

A coaster.
A floppy is too light to become paperweight.

[glharlor]

If they didn't write the virus to destroy software then why did they update it when someone came up with an antivirus. They clearly had malicious intentions

[isakill]

My first computer virus was the green worm. Caught it off of a mouse driver disc. I then became obsessed with them and started collecting. By the time I was done, I had a couple megabytes worth of them. This was back when 40MB harddrives were considered large.

[Ironclad]

10:15 How are they going to claim it wasn't malicious, if they were actively updating it to bypass security?

[paybo]

"Number 5 is alive" now I know where that quote came from. I found it in Astro's Playroom when I found the PS5 artifact 😂

[Ningyo]

I remember getting a virus from Lemmings too. From what I understood, it was called the LAMER virus, as it wrote "LAMER" to three (I think it was three) random places on any disc put in. Bad data and disks then followed. I never got the something wonderful message.

I'm glad that this was (well before) I got a hard drive!