And when I presented it, well at the end of the presentation,

somebody in the audience came up and said,

you know, I'm from the NSA,

and if you would have told us you were presenting this,

we would have stopped it.

And I said, well, that's why I didn't

tell you.

Hi and welcome to Sabri malicious life besides I'm Wren Leffi. The modern landscape of cyber security threats is quite varied.

There's ransomware, keyloggers, D-D-D-D-D-Sats attacks, spam fishing, corporate breaches, blackmail, sim swapping, and the list goes on and on.

I mean, we're closing in on our 200th episode here in Malicious Life and we still haven't covered everything there is

to cover.

But back in the 1980s, in the very early days of the personal computer revolution, there was basically only one threat, the

computer virus.

And even it was so rare right up to the late 80s that many computer professionals regarded it as a myth.

Even the legendary Peter Norton, who went on to write one of the early antivirus software is famously known to have said in 1988

that computer viruses are nothing more than an urban legend like the mythical

alligators in the sewers of New York.

But viruses were real.

They were born from the early experiments in self-replicating programs in the enterprises who had access to the colossal and pricey computers of that time.

And it was our guest today, Dr. Fred Cohen, who was the first to recognize the importance

and potential impact of computer viruses.

In his 1984 seminal paper, computer viruses, theory and experiments, Cohen not only introduced the name Computer virus, a term

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