January 19: The first computer virus was released (1986)

Infected boot sector by (c)Brain

The first computer virus for DOS, so called (c)Brain or Brain, was released. It was created by brothers Basit and Amjad Iqbal lived in Chahmiran, Lahore, Pakistan and infected the boot sector of the storage media formatted with the DOS File Allocation Table (FAT) filesystem. When a IBM PC is infected by the virus, the boot sector is moved to another sector and gets marked as bad and the virus occupies the boot sector. The disk label is changed to (c)Brain. The virus slows down the floppy disk drive and make 7k bytes of memory unavailable to DOS.The intention of writing the virus was to protect the Iqbal brothers' heart monitoring software from piracy. Unlike other viruses, this virus was designed to avoid infect hard disks and the virus was not so destructive by design. The virus also included contact address and three phone numbers with a statement saying vaccine was available from them.