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APPROACHING ZERO

AIDS scheme to fund a mass, worldwide mailing, using another trojan. The potential return from one million diskettes is a rather improbable $378 million.

The police also had suspicions that Popp, far from being mentally unstable, had entered into the scheme with some cunning and foresight. He had, for instance, purposely avoided sending any of the diskettes to addresses in the United States, where he lived, possibly believing that would make him immune to prosecution under American law.

But the case was never to come to trial. Popp's defence presented evidence that his mental state had deteriorated. Their client, his British lawyers said, had begun putting curlers in his beard and wearing a cardboard box on his head to protect himself from radiation. In November 1991 the Crown Prosecution Service accepted that Popp was mentally unfit to stand trial. The Computer Crime Unit has still never successfully prosecuted a virus writer.³

For Popp, whatever his motives and his mental state, the AIDS scheme was an expensive affair. The stamps alone to send out the first 20,000 diskettes had cost £4,000, the envelopes and labels £6,000, the diskettes and the blue printed instruction leaflet yet another £6,000 — to say nothing of the cost of registering PC Cyborg Corporation in Panama, or paying for the accommodation address in London. All funded from his own pocket.

And far from grossing $7.5 million, not one licence payment was ever received from anyone, anywhere.

Popp's scheme, John Austen has said, was not ‘particularly well thought out’. The scam depended on recipients of his diskettes mailing cheques half-way around the world in the hope of receiving an antidote to the trojan. But, as Austen says, ‘Who in their right minds would send money to a post office box number in Panama City for an antidote which might never arrive?’ Or which may not be an antidote, anyway.

It's probable that viruses and trojans, which can only cause damage to computers, will never be money-spinners — at least not for their writers. But hacking, which gives access to information, has been proven to be substantially more lucrative.

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