Roberts's book, Computer Viruses, was the first attempt to put the problem into perspective. In it he describes his interviews with the newly formed Computer Virus Industry Association (CVIA), a body representing virus researchers and consultants that had identified "twenty different types that attack IBM PCs and compatibles" and fourteen others that infect other types of computers. The CVIA also listed the names of the top five virus strains by reported incidence as Scores, Brain, SCSI, Lehigh, and Merritt. Yet the Lehigh virus seemed to be confined to Lehigh University; Brain was relatively harmless in that the damage it caused was infrequent and accidental; and the Merritt virus (sometimes called Alameda or Yale) was a benign virus that simply replicated and had been seen at only a few universities and colleges. The SCSI virus attacked only the Amiga, which was primarily a games machine. The most threatening virus on the list was Scores, even though it seemed to be directed against one particular company. Of the twenty-nine other reported viruses, either they had been seen only once or twice or their existence was unconfirmed. (The twenty viruses Greenburg claimed to have in quarantine were not on the list.) And that, according to the CVIA, was about the size of the virus problem in the summer of 1988.
In the following year Greenberg wrote an article for Byte, an eminently respectable American computer magazine, in which he described two of the viruses he had in quarantine: his favorite number-transposing virus, now named Screen, and a similar one that he had reported to researchers as dBase, which transposed characters within files. It was called dBase because it targeted records generated by a popular program of the same name.
In 1988 and even early 1989, viruses were exceedingly rare, so there was a growing suspicion about Greenberg's claims to have twenty unnamed bugs in some sort of quarantine. It was thought that Greenberg was exaggerating for effect. Other virus researchers understandably wanted copies of Greenberg's viruses and, in particular, the dBase virus he had described in detail.
Eventually Greenberg produced a copy of dBase. It wasn't quite as he had first described it; it had only been seen on one unidentified site, and only then by Greenberg, but at least its existence could be verified. However, the existence of the other nineteen viruses, including Screen, has yet to be confirmed.
Other early viruses were equally problematic. A virus researcher named Pamela Kane told writer Ralph Roberts about the Sunnyvale Slug, which flashed the message, "Greetings from Sunnyvale. Can you find me?" on infected machines. But it has never been confirmed as a virus, nor seen since Kane first reported it. Then there was the "retro-virus," reported to have been distributed with three popular but unnamed shareware (free, shared software) programs. It was said to have been programmed to detach itself from its infected hosts--a program or file--and then to reinfect them at some future date. It was "like a submarine rigged for silent running . . . the retro-virus waits until the destroyers have stowed their depth charges and gone back to port before returning to sink ships," it was claimed, somewhat colorfully, in the computing journal Info World. At the time, the retro-virus was without a doubt the most sinister virus ever reported, but it had only been seen once--by the researcher who reported it.
The CVIA was not averse to creating a few myths of its own. Its chairman, John McAfee, an ebullient and eminently quotable computer expert, was always available to fill in the press on the irresistible spread of viruses. He was a good interviewee, with a store of anecdotes about computer viruses and reports of virus attacks at generally unidentified companies and institutions, and he managed to give the impression that each anecdote could lead to a thousand more, that each incident was representative of a hundred others. In 1988 and 1989, reports about viruses always intimated that what was public knowledge was only the tip of the iceberg--that the problem was much bigger, much wider, and much more pervasive than anyone suspected. But far from being the tip of the iceberg, what had been reported was the whole problem--and even that was seen through a prism. The hype had its effect, however, and sales of antivirus software soared.
Born in science fiction, legitimized by academia and institutionalized by the Computer Virus Industry Association, the computer virus finally came of age on September 26,1988, when it made the front cover of Time magazine.
