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scan of one of the computers with the new anti-virus software, one of the small crew working over the Independence Day holiday was flashed a warning: Yankee Doodle was back. The technical specialists, called into the offices from their homes, discovered to their horror that 320 machines had now been infected. They contacted the publisher of their anti-viral software about their latest attack. 'You missed a spot,' he explained laconically.

The company was forced to shut down its computers again, and again staff and machinery sat idle while the support staff went laboriously through each and every program on all 1,500 machines. There was no damage: the bug was eradicated and the programs reinstalled without even a byte of data lost. But the lack of damage disguised the virus's real cost — downtime. By the time Yankee Doodle had been completely eradicated the company had suffered one week's lost production, one week in which 1,500 staff were idle, one week of irrecoverable business. The company never quantified its loss, but it is estimated to run into hundreds of thousands of dollars — all from what was purported to be a harmless virus.

Since 1990 virus researchers have pieced together a history of Yankee Doodle. It was first spotted in 1989 in the United Nations offices in Vienna, on a computer game called Outrun. The game is proprietary, though pirate copies are passed around on diskette. Someone, somewhere, is thought to have infected a copy of the game — accidentally or deliberately — and the virus began its travels, first to Vienna, then around the world courtesy of the United Nations. Though there are known to be fifty-one versions of the virus, they are all based on one original prototype. And that program, despite the virus's all-American name, was written in Bulgaria.

In the same month that the West Coast publishing company was trying to eradicate Yankee Doodle, a major financial services house in the American north-east was hit by another bug. This one wasn't a joke; it was deliberately malicious.

The first symptoms appeared when one of the secretaries was unable to print out a letter she had just entered into her computer. In such cases people follow much the same routine: the secretary checked the paper, switched both the computer and the printer off

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