What Is Elk Cloner?

Elk Cloner is a boot-part virus that invades a computer's hardware. While it can copy itself onto other computers, Elk Cloner has no practical use. It was created as part of an April Fool prank in 1982 by John Leidner at MIT; it was coded in 6502 assembly language, and it was a joke to make fun of an article that claimed that there were some viruses out there with practical uses. Unfortunately for him, not only did his software spread at a great rate but also everyone started thinking it had some practical use! Elk Cloner is a dreadful virus that invades your computer's hardware but can also copy itself onto other computers. When you start your computer, the virus copies itself into its memory before booting up. When another disk is inserted into the laptop, Elk Cloner will automatically copy itself onto the clean disk resulting in a network-like infection. One of the earliest computer viruses to see the light of day was the Elk Cloner virus. Rich Skrenta, who was only 15 years old, developed the virus. The virus used a straightforward method of spreading itself, infecting executable files stored on floppy disks, which at that time was one of the few ways to transfer data from one computer to another. It was successful in infecting millions of Apple II systems. In the early 1980s, Prodigy, a popular BBS for young computer users, used a list of infected users to control access in and out of the system. Skrenta's program detected the presence of this list and deleted it so that his colleagues could continue to access the board. He then turned his attention back to a pet project, which had been languishing on his hard disk for some time - he wanted to make all of his friends' floppy disks auto-infecting viruses.