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THE BULGARIAN THREAT

But within the code the staff saw two strings of text: 'Eddie lives . . . somewhere in time!' said the first. The second announced: 'This program was written in the city of Sofia 1988–1989 © Dark Avenger.'

The supervisor phoned the vendor again: 'Who the hell is the Dark Avenger?'

The short answer, the vendor explained patiently, is that no one knows. The Dark Avenger is an enigma. Most virus writers remain anonymous, their viruses appearing, seemingly, out of the ether, without provenance or claimed authorship, but the Dark Avenger is different: not only does he put his name to his viruses, he also signals where they were written – Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. The Dark Avenger's viruses began seeping into the West in 1989. They are all highly contagious and maliciously destructive.

'The virus you've been hit with is called Eddie, or sometimes the Dark Avenger,' the vendor told the increasingly worried technical support supervisor. 'It must be a new strain or something. That's why it wasn't picked up. Is there any other text message, a girl's name?'

The supervisor took a closer look at the virus. 'I missed it before. There's another word here, "Diana P". What does this thing do?'

'Well, as it's a new version, the answer is I don't know. Until we've seen a copy, it's anybody's guess.'

To discover what a virus actually does it has to be disassembled, its operating instructions – the program – taken apart line by line. This is a difficut and time-consuming process and can be carried out only by specialists. In the meantime the technical support staff could only wait and watch as the virus spread slowly through the company, bouncing from machine to machine via the network cables that interlinked the company's 2,200 computers.

Viruses like Eddie work by attaching a copy of themselves to an executable file; whenever an infected program is used, the virus springs into action. It usually has two tasks: first, to find more files to infect; then, after it has had enough time to spread its infection, to release its payload. It was obvious that Eddie was spreading, so it was already performing its infection task. What was worrying was what its payload would prove to be.

To arrest the spread of the bug, it was decided to turn off all the

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