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PROLOGUE

Welcome to the computer underworld - a metaphysical place that exists only in the web of international data communications networks, peopled by electronics wizards who have made it their recreation centre, their meeting ground, their home.

The members of the underworld are adolescents like Fry Guy who prowl through computer systems looking for information, for data, for links to other webs . . . for credit card numbers.

The networks were built to speed communications around the world, to link companies and research centres, to transfer data from computer to computer. Because they must be accessible, they have been targeted by computer-obsessed amateurs like Fry Guy - sometimes for exploration, sometimes for theft.

Almost every computer system of note has been hacked: the Pentagon, NATO, NASA, universities, military and industrial research laboratories. The cost of the depradations attributed to computer fraud has been estimated at £2 billion each year in the United States and the United Kingdom alone. And some 85 per cent of computer crime is thought not to be reported.

The computer underworld can also be vindictive. In the past five years the number of malicious programs - popularly known as viruses - has increased exponentially. Viruses serve no useful purpose: they are simply agents of destruction.

The underworld continues to grow. In a very short time it has become a major threat to the technology-dependent societies of the Western industrial powers.

It is a threat that was born almost thirty years ago, when telephone operators were replaced by computers.

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