Fred Cohen

Frederick B. Cohen, born in 1956, is an American computer scientist best known as the inventor of computer virus defense techniques, and he gave the definition of a computer virus. In 1983, while a student at the University of Southern California's School of Engineering, he wrote in Leonard Adleman's class a short experimental program that could infect computers, copy itself and spread from one machine to another, hidden inside a larger legitimate program loaded from a floppy disk; it was one of the first computer viruses. His 1987 demonstration that no algorithm can perfectly detect all possible viruses is one of the few solid theoretical results in the study of computer viruses. He also believed in positive viruses and created a compression virus that shrinks the executable files it infects. His pioneering work covers computer viruses, high-integrity operating system mechanisms now in widespread use, and the automation of protection management, and he has written over 60 professional publications and 11 books.