The Rabbit virus, created in 1974, was a self-replicating virus and caused the system to crash by eating up system resources.

Animal was the first Trojan. It did not do any damage to the system but moved on to different systems.

Frederick Cohen first coined the term virus for software.

Brain was the first boot sector virus, released in 1986. The virus was created in Pakistan and is therefore also called the Lahore virus.

Brain was followed by the Vienna virus and the Lehigh virus.

The Morris worm, created in 1988 by Robert Tappan Morris, had the capability to spread using the internet by exploiting a buffer overflow vulnerability.

Ghostball, released in 1989, was the first to infect executables.