Academic Research
The notion of a self-reproducing computer program can be traced back to initial theories about the operation of complex automata. John von Neumann showed that in theory a program could reproduce itself. This constituted a plausibility result in computability theory. Fred Cohen experimented with computer viruses and confirmed Neumann's postulate and investigated other properties of malware such as detectability, self-obfuscation using rudimentary encryption, and others. His Doctoral dissertation was on the subject of computer viruses.
Read more about this topic: Malware
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