Later it was discovered that the virus had been included on a computer game shown at a meeting of a Macintosh users' group in Montreal. A speaker at the meeting had accidentally copied the virus onto a diskette, and subsequently infected a computer in the offices of Aldus, a Seattle-based software publisher, for whom he was doing some work. The company then unwittingly copied the virus onto what was later described as "several thousand" copies of a program called Freehand, which were distributed to thousands of computer stores. After complaints from consumers, who were quite bewildered at receiving a peace message with their software, the company recalled five thousand copies of the program.
The MacMag virus, though relatively widely distributed, was not malicious. After displaying its message, it removed itself from infected systems. Nevertheless, it was an unwanted extra and served to demonstrate the speed and ease with which self-replicating programs could propagate. When questioned about the morality of deliberately publishing Davidson's virus, Brandow was quoted as saying, "You can't blame Einstein for Hiroshima."
The second Macintosh virus to be reported in 1988 was called Scores and was much more serious. On April 19,1988 Electronic Data Systems (EDS) of Dallas, a subsidiary of General Motors, announced that twenty-four of its machines had been infected with a virus that was thought to have been written by a disgrun- tled ex-employee. The virus had infected the operating system and two standard files of each computer, and then hidden itself inside two more secret files that it had created. Two days after a system has been infected with Scores, the virus begins to spread to the other programs on the computer--in particular, it looks for two specific programs developed by EDS, and when it finds them, it prevents the computer user from saving his data, thereby causing the loss of whatever he was working on.
By early 1988 a small but potentially lucrative computer security industry had begun to specialize in protecting machines from viruses. A number of computer specialists offered their services as security consultants or sold computer software designed to track down and kill viruses. But despite Brain, Lehigh, and the two Macintosh viruses, there was little real evidence of the oft-hyped plague of computer bugs. It was understandable that writers of antiviral software and others in the new security industry would exaggerate the threat; they were like burglar-alarm salesmen in a community without very many burglars. They needed to convince the public that a slew of viruses was gathering, to be unleashed on defenseless computer users in the coming year.
The emotive term virus helped their case, as did the willingness of the press to publish dubious statistics and unverified, unsourced stories of virus incidents--particularly the computer magazines, which were then locked in a difficult circulation war and looking for something out of the ordinary to write about. Viruses made good copy, as did nightmarish stories about the effects of a plague. In essence, the burglars hadn't quite hit town yet, but by God they were on the way.
One of the earliest antiviral programs for IBM PC-type computers was the work of a New York-based programmer, Ross Greenberg. He said that he had seen the impending virus threat coming for years, and had therefore created a program called Flu Shot.
During the summer of 1988 Greenberg was contacted by writer Ralph Roberts, who was researching a book about computer viruses. According to Roberts, Greenberg insisted that he had "about twenty viruses in quarantine." When asked to identify them, Greenberg told the writer, "I don't give the little suckers names." But he did describe his "favorite virus," which he said could randomly transpose two numbers on the screen. "Sounds cute," he reportedly said, "but it could be dangerous if you're using Lotus 1-2-3 [a program used for accounting] to run a multimillion-dollar company."
