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NOTES

2 The supposed Chinese virus is called Bloody! and contans the message: 'Bloody! Jun. 4, 1989' — the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre of students by the Chinese army in Beijing.

3 The authors have agreed not to reveal the identity of the publishing company; the financial services company in the next section is also not identified. Few companies are willing to admit publicly to having been the victims of computer viruses.

4 Teodor abandoned Version 1, keeping neither a copy nor a record of its program code. Though he eventually produced fifty-one versions, only sixteen are known to have survived.

5 Viruses like 'Find Me!' are known as companion viruses, in that they create a 'companion' COM file to the EXE file.

6 Though the writers called their virus Creeping Death, it is known to researchers as DIR-2. It is quite common for viruses to have multiple names: researchers have been unable to agree on a naming convention, so even a virus as common as Jerusalem has alternatives, including Friday the 13th and Israeli.

7 The Murphy viruses were named by their authors and each contained a text message. 'Hello, I'm Murphy. Nice to meet you friend. I'm written since Nov/Dec. Copywrite © 1989 by Lubo & Ian, Sofia, USM Laboratory', was the message in Murphy 1. Murphy 2 carried the string: 'It's me — Murphy. Copywrite 1990 by Lubo & Ian, USM Laboratory.'

8 English, or a sort of English, is the lingua franca of the computer industry. These messages are reproduced as they were written.

6 Hacking for Profit

1 Some counters on the Install programs had glitches in them, and attacked the hard disk after only nine boot-ups.

2 The Computer Crime Unit also tried sending a cheque for $189, the minimum licence fee, to the post office box in Panama City. Six weeks later their letter came back, marked 'return to sender'.

3 Two other virus writers have been identified by the Computer Crime Unit but have not been prosecuted. In one case there was an apparent lack of criminal intent; in the other the author was 'extremely young' and said to be 'remorseful'.

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