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ment, providing information, background and documentation on subjects of concern. Part of the service uses a network of Compaq computers, and it was this system that was causing problems. Computer files that should have been available appeared to be missing; others were corrupted or incomplete; some of the file names were distorted.

As the days went by the problems multiplied, and the head of computer systems at the library called in an outside specialist. A virus detection program run on one of the affected machines came up clean, but from the way the computers were malfunctioning, the specialist was convinced the House of Commons library had been hit by a virus. He compared the lengths of the program files on an infected machine with those on a clean computer. As expected, the programs on the infected computer were longer, which suggested the unknown virus was attaching itself to the ends of program files. A visual inspection of the virus followed, revealing one full word in the jumble of characters on the screen: ‘Nomenklatura’.

The word is of Russian origin, though in common use throughout Eastern Europe. It was the name given to the upper echelons of the Communist party and the high-ranking bureaucrats; the class which did well from the old system, those who had access to the special shops and the special rations, the cars and the country homes. It is a pejorative now, and was almost certainly picked by the virus writer for its ironic overtones.

A copy of the virus, immediately nicknamed Nomenklatura, was sent to a British researcher, Alan Solomon, who runs a specialist computer data recovery service from Berkhamstead, north-west of London. When he disassembled the bug, he found he was looking at one of the most destructive viruses he had ever seen.

The virus’s target proved to be the FAT, the all-important File Allocation Table. With the FAT corrupted, the computer would be unable to reassemble data files in the correct order – hence the gaps in the information accessed in the House of Commons library. Solomon also noticed a string of text characters within the Nomenklatura program. It could be a message, he thought, except the text was represented on his computer screen by a code that appeared to refer to non-English language characters – like Greek or Russian. Solomon guessed it was Bulgarian.

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