The evolution of malware has transitioned from simple, disruptive scripts in the 1990s and early 2000s to profit-driven, industrialized operations in the 2010s, and now to autonomous, AI-driven threats emerging in 2023 and beyond. Early threats like the ILOVEYOU virus and Melissa macro virus relied on user interaction for propagation, while later eras introduced ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) and botnets like Mirai that targeted infrastructure for financial gain. The current era is defined by AI-augmented
