In Plovdiv, Bulgaria's second largest town, a student named Peter Dimov produced a series of viruses "as revenge against his tutor" and another two "in tribute" to his girlfriend, Nina (it is not known if she was pleased). One of Peter's ambitions was to write the world's smallest virus: his first came to under 200 bytes. Later he wrote one only 45 bytes long. For a few weeks it was the shortest virus known--until another Bulgarian programmer produced one that was just 30 bytes. Peter was also the author of the first Bulgarian boot-sector virus as well as two ominous-sounding bugs that he called Terror and Manowar. But despite their names, neither was particularly damaging. In total, Peter wrote around twenty-five viruses.
In Varna, on the Black Sea, two students at the Mathematics Gymnasium (Upper School), Vasil Popov and Stanislav Kirilov, produced a series of viruses and trojans. Their most dangerous, called Creeping Death (or DIR-2), was reported to be able to infect all the files on a hard disk within minutes.
Lubomir Mateev, then a twenty-three-year-old university student, and his friend Iani Brankov wrote a virus together to embarrass their professor when they were studying at Sofia University. Their first bug was programmed to make a shuffling noise while he was lecturing that sounded like the rustling of paper.
This virus and a subsequent variant (which borrowed the bouncing-ball payload from Ping Pong) became known as Murphy 1 and Murphy 2. Highly infectious, they spread throughout Bulgaria and reached the West in 1991.
Many other programmers and students took a stab at writing nruses, with varying degrees of success. It became something of a fad among computer freaks in Sofia and other Bulgarian cities in the late 1980s. There was, of course, no "factory" in the usual sense of the word--just a group of young men (they were all male), probably unknown to each other, who had learned the tricks of writing viruses through the techniques perfected while stealing Western software.
The value to Bulgaria of all the virus-writing activity was negligible. Though the programmers who compiled the bugs were, no doubt, honing their skills, and some of the viruses demonstrated a cleverness and technical dexterity that may have been admirable, viruses simply do not have any productive purpose. Indeed, Fred Cohen--the man who coined the term "computer virus" in the first place-- once tried to find a role for them and organized a competition to write a beneficial virus. None was found.
In any event, in late 1990 and early 1991, Bulgaria itself, no longer Communist and not quite democratic, was going through an identity crisis. Public confidence in the government, in state institutions, and in the currency had evaporated, to be replaced by a deeply cynical, almost anarchic national ethos. Bulgaria had become a country of shabby, small-time dealers, of petty blackmarketers and crooked currency changers. The symbols of the immediate past, of the near half-century of Communism, had been pulled down; little had been erected in their place. But the computers that President Zhirkov had decreed would turn Bulgaria into a modern technological power remained, and indeed offered themselves to the new generation of computer programmers as weapons to be turned against the state, to drive an electronic stake through the heart of the system. Viruses would cripple Zhivkov's dream. In this gray time of shortages and rationing, of cynicism and despair, writing viruses was a sort of protest--perhaps against the Communists, possibly against the transitional state, almost certainly against the lack of opportunity and hope. Writing viruses was a form of individualism, of striking out; it was also an opportunity for notoriety.
Since 1988 the Bulgarian virus factory has produced around two hundred new viruses. Most have yet to travel; only a few have reached the industrialized West. The scale of the problem may not become apparent for several years.
Some of those who created the viruses are known, some aren't, but the greatest threat is Bulgaria's most proficient and fearsome virus writer: the Dark Avenger.
The man who was to become known as the Dark Avenger began work on his first virus in September 1988. "In those days there were no viruses being written in Bulgaria, so I decided to write the first," he once said. "In early March 1989 it came into existence and started to live its own life, and to terrorize all engineers and other suckers."
