Fred Cohen
Frederick B. Cohen (born 1957) is an American computer scientist and best known as the inventor of computer virus defense techniques.
In 1983, while a student at the University of Southern California's School of Engineering (currently the Viterbi School of Engineering), he wrote a program for a parasitic application that seized control of computer operations, one of the first computer viruses, in Leonard Adleman’s class. He wrote a short program, as an experiment, that could "infect" computers, make copies of itself, and spread from one machine to another. It was hidden inside a larger, legitimate program, which was loaded into a computer on a floppy disk -- something few computers sold today can accommodate anymore.
One of the few solid theoretical results in the study of computer viruses is Cohen's 1987 demonstration that there is no algorithm that can perfectly detect all possible viruses.
Cohen also believed there are positive viruses and he had created one called the compression virus which spreading would infect all executable files on a computer, not to destroy, but to make them smaller.
He has many other works related to computer viruses. Cohen now runs a computer security firm.
Read more about Fred Cohen: Papers
Famous quotes containing the words fred and/or cohen:
“Another one o’ them new worlds. No beer, no women, no pool parlors, nothing. Nothing to do but throw rocks at tin cans. And we gotta bring our own tin cans.”
—Cyril Hume, and Fred McLeod Wilcox. Cook (Earl Holliman)
“Nevertheless, no school can work well for children if parents and teachers do not act in partnership on behalf of the children’s best interests. Parents have every right to understand what is happening to their children at school, and teachers have the responsibility to share that information without prejudicial judgment.... Such communication, which can only be in a child’s interest, is not possible without mutual trust between parent and teacher.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)