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THE BULGARIAN THREAT

To confirm his hunch, Solomon dialled an electronic bulletin board in Sofia, linking to the East European country via Fidonet, an international public-access computer network run by hobbyists. The board he accessed was owned by MicroComm, a subsidiary of the Bulgarian public telephone company. Once linked to the board, he managed to make contact with one of the company’s engineers, Veni Markovski, who spoke a little English. Solomon uploaded the code to Sofia and Veni looked at it with his Cyrillic converter. If the code represented Cyrillic characters, the converter – a program that translates keyboard strokes into Cyrillic – would recognize them and display the message in the virus. The text, though, would be in Bulgarian, which was why Solomon needed Veni’s help.

The converter rapidly deciphered the code, changing it to Cyrillic. Solomon had guessed correctly. The phrase, Veni reported, was an idiomatic Bulgarian expression. It took some time to translate – Veni’s English is poor – and its meaning is obscure. But, Veni said, it translates to something like: 'This fat idiot instead of kissing the girl’s lips, kisses quite some other thing.'

Solomon wasn’t surprised that the message was in Bulgarian. By 1990 everyone involved in computer security had become aware that something odd was going on in that obscure East European country. Increasingly sophisticated and damaging viruses that affected IBM-type PCs were moving into the West, carried on diskette or transferred by electronic bulletin boards, and all had one thing in common: they had been written in Bulgaria.

Though only a few of the viruses had actually been seen 'in the wild' – that is, infecting computers – reports from Bulgaria suggested that two new viruses were being discovered in that country every week. By mid-1990 there were so many reported Bulgarian viruses that one researcher was moved to refer to the existence of a 'Bulgarian virus factory'. The phrase stuck.

The origins of that factory go back to the last decade. In the early 1980s the president of Bulgaria, Todor Zhivkov, then older than the century itself, decided that his country was to become a high-tech power, with computers managing the economy while industry concentrated on manufacturing hardware to match that of the West. Bulgaria, he decided, would function as the hardware manufacturing

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