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ous, however, was Burger’s decision to publish a reconstruction of the Vienna program code in the second edition of his book. This became the recipe for writing viruses.

Programmers with access to the code could quite easily adapt it for their own purposes – by altering the payload, for instance. That’s what eventually happened with Vienna.⁶ Though Burger had deliberately altered his reconstruction before publication to make it unworkable, programmers had little trouble finding their way around the alterations. Variants of Vienna have been found all over the world: in Hungary, a Vienna clone carries a sales message, which translates roughly as ‘Polimer tape cassettes are the best. Go for them.’ A Russian version was adapted to destroy the computer’s hard disk – the internal memory and storage area for programs – after infecting sixty-four files. A Polish variant displays the message ‘Merry Christmas’ on infected computers during the period 19–31 December. A version from Portugal carries out the standard overwriting of the eighth program, but also displays the word ‘Aids’. In the US a group of hackers and virus writers known as Rabid used Vienna as the basis for the Violator series of viruses, all intentionally damaging to computer systems.

It is ironic that a book written to warn about the dangers of viruses should be the medium for distributing the recipe for writing them. But even though by mid-1987 no one had yet recorded a proven virus attack on a computer system anywhere in the world, and the predicted plague of computer viruses was still part of science fiction, the potential threat of viruses was being hyped by computer engineers like Burger and by a small group of computer security consultants in America, and many people appeared remarkably eager to believe them. In what was probably the first press report of viruses, in February 1987, the editor of the computer trade journal Computers & Security wrote: ‘Computer viruses can be deadly . . . Last year a continuous-process industry’s computer crashed causing hundreds of thousands of dollars’ damage. A post mortem revealed that it had been infected with a computer virus. Another nation-wide organization’s computer system crashed twice in less than a year. The cause of each crash was a computer virus . . . A computer virus can cause an epidemic which today we are unable to combat.’

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