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ment Programme offices in Geneva the trojan had caused the loss of some data; in Italy an AIDS research centre at the University of Bologna said it lost ten years of research. The trojan reached hospitals and clinics in Britain, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and Germany. The Chase Manhattan Bank and International Computers Limited (ICL) in England both reported unspecified 'problems' resulting from the program. In every instance, scientists, researchers and computer operators wasted days chasing down and eliminating the bug, even after Jim's antidote and ClearAid program became generally available.

At New Scotland Yard the Computer Crime Unit under Detective Inspector John Austen established that all 20,000 diskettes had been posted from west and southwest London, between 7 and 11 December 1989. They had been sent to addresses in almost every country of the world, with one glaring exception: none had been sent to the United States.

The Computer Crime Unit does not have an easy job. In many cases the unit has been frustrated by the unusual nature of computer crime, and with viruses it has been noticeably unsuccessful in bringing prosecutions. Most viruses are written abroad, by unknown and certainly untraceable authors, often in countries (like Bulgaria) where the act itself is not a criminal offence. To prosecute a case against a virus writer, the unit needs, first, a complaint against the author from a victim in Britain; second, evidence of criminal intent; third, proof of the author's identity; and finally, his presence in Britain, or at least in a country from which he can be extradited.

The legal problem with viruses, quite simply, is their internationality. They seep across borders, carried anonymously on diskettes or uploaded via phone lines to bulletin boards; their provenance is often unknown; their authorship usually a mystery. But Inspector John Austen was determined the AIDS diskette incident would be different. He viewed it as the 'most serious' case the unit had faced: not only was it a large scale attack on computers by a trojan horse program, it was blackmail - or something very similar. In this case, also, he had a complaint; indeed, he had a few thousand complaints.

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