Then, as Burger was preparing the second edition of his book he received a copy of a virus found in Vienna by a local journalist. This virus, now known as Vienna, was said to have appeared at a local university in December 1987. Its writer is unknown, as are the writers of most viruses.
Burger described Vienna as "extremely clever." But by the standards of virus writing today, it wasn't, though it was certainly the most advanced virus in existence at the time. Vienna is known as a file virus because it attaches itself to what are known in the computer industry somewhat tediously as executable files (i.e., the software, such as a word-processing program, that actually enables a computer to do something useful). When an infected program is loaded onto a computer from a diskette (or transferred through a network), Vienna comes with it and slips itself into the computer's memory. It then looks for other executable files to infect, and after infecting seven it damages the eighth, simply by overwriting itself onto the program code.
Although the payload of the Vienna virus was destructive--the eighth program that was damaged was irreparable--by presentday standards it wasn't particularly malicious. More dangerous was Burger's decision to publish a reconstruction of the Vienna program code in the second edition of his book. It 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. Though Burger had deliberately altered his reconstruction 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 that 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 between December 19th and 31st. 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 unknown American virus writers used Vienna as the basis for a series of viruses called Violator, 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 no one had yet documented a proven virus attack on a computer system anywhere in the world, and the predicted plague of computer viruses had not yet materialized, the potential threat of viruses was being aggressively 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 interna- tional computer trade journal Computers de 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 nationwide 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."
It has never been possible to trace either the "continuous process" corporation or the "nationwide organization" whose computers had been so badly damaged by viruses. Like so many aspects of computer viruses, investigation only reveals myth and legend, rarely fact. But myth is self-perpetuating, and prophecies are often self-fulfilling.
VIRUSES, TROIANS, WORMS, AND BOMBS
