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| Amjad Farooq Alvi |
Basit Farooq Alvi along with his brother Amjad Farooq Alvi are known for having developed the Personal Computer virus known as (c)Brain. The virus is considered to be the first virus for the PC. At the time the brothers were developing medical software and intended for virus to protect their work from piracy by supposedly targeting copyright infringers only. They were reportedly helped by Muhammad Khaleeq from Sahiwal, Irfan Shahid & Rizwan Chand from Lahore. The brothers lived in Chah Miran, Lahore, Pakistan, and are still in business as internet service providers with their company, Brain Telecommunication Limited.
Brain affects the IBM PC computer by replacing the boot sector of a floppy disk with a copy of the virus. The real boot sector is moved to another sector and marked as bad. Infected disks usually have five kilobytes of bad sectors. The disk label is changed to ©Brain, and the following text can be seen in infected boot sectors:
Welcome to the Dungeon (c) 1986 Brain & Amjads (pvt) Ltd VIRUS_SHOE RECORD V9.0 Dedicated to the dynamic memories of millions of viruses who are no longer with us today - Thanks GOODNESS!! BEWARE OF THE er..VIRUS : this program is catching program follows after these messages....$#@%$@!!