India, June 8 -- The Creeper program is generally considered the world's first computer virus. Born as an experiment in 1971, it infected computers and slowed operations to a crawl. Reaper was the world's first antivirus, designed to destroy it. The battle has waged on ever since. There was the Brain virus from 1986, which spread through floppy disks and flashed alarming messages of infection on home computers (while also slowing them down). Then came the Morris Worm, a self-replicating program created at Cornell University, as part of an unofficial experiment, in 1988. It swept the world, slowing computers down to such a degree that a single email could take days to send. Fast-forward to 2024, and a new beast has emerged, from a joint expe...