Computer Viruses
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50 free Computer Viruses trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Computer viruses started out as experiments and schoolboy pranks, and within a generation they were shutting down hospitals, airlines and factories. The stories behind them are stranger than most people expect: worms named after whatever their discoverers happened to be drinking, teenagers who walked free because no law covered what they had done, and outbreaks that were stopped almost by accident. This quiz covers the famous outbreaks from the 1970s to the 2010s, the people who wrote the code and the people who fought it, and the basic ideas behind it all, including what separates a virus from a worm and a Trojan horse. Every answer comes with a brief explanation, so you learn the story as you play. It suits IT and computing students revising malware basics, security enthusiasts testing their history, and anyone who remembers being told not to open that email attachment.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The 2003 Blaster worm hid a message in its code telling which tech billionaire to fix his software?
Bill Gates
Bill Gates was the Microsoft co-founder it addressed, and Blaster also set infected PCs to flood the Windows Update website with traffic.
Q 02Researchers named the 2001 Code Red worm after a flavour of which soft drink they were drinking?
Mountain Dew
Mountain Dew Code Red kept two eEye Digital Security researchers going as they dissected the worm, which was built to attack fixed addresses including the White House web server.
Q 03A 2001 email worm tricked people into opening it by promising a photo of which Russian tennis star?
Anna Kournikova
Anna Kournikova was the bait, and the 20-year-old Dutchman behind the worm built it in a few hours with a ready-made toolkit, then surrendered to police days later.
Q 04Which virus, named after a Renaissance artist, caused a 1992 media scare over PCs being wiped on 6 March?
Michelangelo
Michelangelo slept until the artist's birthday each year, and after warnings that millions of PCs carried it, most owners scanned and removed it in time, so the day passed with little damage.
Q 05In which film does Jeff Goldblum's character upload a computer virus to an alien mothership?
Independence Day
Independence Day has satellite engineer David Levinson use the virus to drop the invaders' shields, so that a nuclear missile can destroy the mothership.
Q 06Onel de Guzman, who released the ILOVEYOU worm in 2000, went free because which country had no hacking law?
Philippines
Philippines prosecutors dropped every charge against the college dropout, even though the worm did roughly $10 billion of damage; a new e-commerce law was signed in response.
Q 07A 2000 email worm, thought to be the first malware aimed at children, featured which Pokémon character?
Pikachu
Pikachu fronted an email that tried to delete key Windows folders, but an accidental prompt asked victims for permission first, which blunted the damage.
Q 08The first known ransomware, mailed out in 1989 by biologist Joseph Popp, arrived on which storage medium?
Floppy disks
Floppy disks labelled as AIDS information carried the program, which scrambled file names after 90 restarts and demanded $189 sent to a post office box in Panama.
Q 09The Jerusalem virus, first detected at an Israeli university in 1987, deleted programs run on which recurring date?
Friday the 13th
Friday the 13th set it off in every year except 1987, so the first strike came on 13 May 1988; the virus also slowed older PCs to a fifth of their normal speed.
Q 10Elk Cloner, an Apple II virus written around 1982 by a 15-year-old as a joke, showed what on every 50th use?
A short poem
A short poem about the virus filled a blank screen, the work of high-school student Rich Skrenta, whose prank became one of the first viruses to escape onto other people's computers.
Q 11Which worm, found in 2010, wrecked Iranian uranium centrifuges by attacking their Siemens industrial controllers?
Stuxnet
Stuxnet used four previously unknown Windows flaws to reach its target, and reportedly destroyed almost one-fifth of Iran's nuclear centrifuges by making them tear themselves apart.
Q 12Which May 2017 ransomware outbreak hit Britain's National Health Service and was later blamed on North Korea?
WannaCry
WannaCry may have reached 70,000 health-service devices, including MRI scanners and blood-storage fridges, before a researcher halted it within hours by finding a kill switch.
Q 13Which antivirus pioneer founded his software company in 1987 and died in a Spanish prison cell in 2021?
John McAfee
Q 21Which ability, shared by viruses and worms, is what a Trojan horse program generally lacks?
Self-propagation
Self-propagation is beyond a Trojan, which, like the wooden horse of Greek myth, depends on tricking a person into letting it in.
Q 22A hijacked computer that sends spam or attacks websites without its owner knowing is given which undead nickname?
Zombie
Zombie machines are herded together into botnets and steered remotely, and most of their owners never realise the computer is taking orders from someone else.
Q 23Traditional antivirus scanners identify known malware by checking files against a database of what?
Signatures
Signatures are extracted from each captured sample and added to the scanner's database, which is why virus writers began making code that disguises itself differently every time.
John McAfee sold his stake in the company that bears his name in 1994, and decades later was arrested in Spain on US tax evasion charges, dying as his extradition was approved.
Q 14CryptoLocker, the 2013 ransomware that locked victims' files, took payment by voucher or in which digital currency?
Bitcoin
Bitcoin bought the unlock key until 2014, when police seized the botnet spreading CryptoLocker and a security firm used the captured keys to build a free recovery tool.
Q 15The CIH virus, which could erase a PC's BIOS chip, was nicknamed after which disaster whose anniversary set it off?
Chernobyl
Chernobyl became the media's name for it because the trigger date was 26 April, although the Taiwanese student who wrote it had simply signed the code with his initials.
Q 16Brain, the first virus for the IBM PC, was written in 1986 by two brothers in which country?
Pakistan
Pakistan's Alvi brothers said they wrote it to stop piracy of their medical software, and they put their own address and phone numbers in the code so victims could call for a cure.
Q 17Which 1971 program, written at BBN to hop between ARPANET mainframes, is widely accepted as the first computer worm?
Creeper
Creeper did no harm beyond printing a taunt on the teletype, and it could never have reached more than 28 machines, the number on the network running the right operating system.
Q 18The Samy worm of 2005 infected over a million user profiles within 20 hours on which social network?
MySpace
MySpace was overrun because every profile that viewed an infected page sent creator Samy Kamkar a friend request and then passed the code on to its own visitors.
Q 19A self-mailing program that clogged IBM's worldwide network in December 1987 drew which festive picture on screen?
A Christmas tree
A Christmas tree made of text characters appeared while the program, written by a university student, quietly sent itself to every entry in the victim's email contacts file.
Q 20Which Hungarian-born mathematician's 1949 lectures on self-reproducing automata laid the theory behind computer viruses?
John von Neumann
John von Neumann described how a program could be designed to reproduce itself decades before anyone released one, which is why he is called the theoretical father of computer virology.
Q 24Melissa, the fast-spreading email virus of 1999, belonged to which class of virus that hides in office documents?
Macro
Macro viruses are written in the scripting language built into applications such as Microsoft Word, so simply opening an infected document is enough to set one off.
Q 25Which area of a drive did 1980s viruses such as Brain and Stoned infect?
Boot sector
Boot sector code is loaded and run before the operating system, which let a virus hiding there take control of the machine ahead of everything else.
Q 26What term describes a virus that mutates its code with each infection so scanners cannot match a fixed pattern?
Polymorphic
Polymorphic code scrambles itself differently in every copy while doing exactly the same job, which forces antivirus tools to hunt for deeper patterns or run it in a safe emulator.
Q 27What name is given to malicious code that lies hidden in a system until a chosen date or condition sets it off?
Logic bomb
Logic bomb is the term, and the textbook case is a programmer who hides code that will start deleting files if he is ever dismissed from the company.
Q 28Borrowed from transport, which term names the part of a virus or worm that carries out the malicious action?
Payload
Payload originally meant the share of a load that pays for the trip; in malware it can be anything from a prank message on screen to wiping the whole drive.
Q 29Which 1972 program by Ray Tomlinson, built to chase and delete an ARPANET worm, is called the first antivirus software?
Reaper
Reaper moved across the network deleting the worm wherever it found it, and the duel between the two programs later inspired the programming game Core War.
Q 30Which 2003 worm, only 376 bytes long, infected most of its 75,000 victims within ten minutes?
Slammer
Slammer, in full SQL Slammer, fitted inside a single network packet, and the flood of copies it sprayed out crashed routers around the world and dramatically slowed internet traffic.