To most people it must seem preposterous that a tiny piece ofcomputer code attached to a single e-mail a week ago Friday could bythe middle of last week have wreaked havoc on millions of computersaround the world.
But to international law enforcers and computer experts, whohave been long aware of the threat posed by viruses, the questionwas: Who wrote the Melissa virus and why?
The "who" may have been answered Thursday night with the arrestin Eatontown, N.J., of David L. Smith, 30, a programmer for a companythat subcontracted for AT&T Corp.But the "why" has not been explained. Authorities said Smith,who faces a maximum of 40 years in prison and a $480,000 fine, namedthe virus after a topless dancer, but they could not explain why hecreated it. "No one can get in the mind of the individual," saidstate Attorney General Peter Verniero.On Saturday, Smith's lawyer said his client never intended to doanything wrong. Steven Altman said his client had been wrongfullyportrayed as a dangerous computer hacker and had been victimized bythe government's crackdown on high-tech crimes."The computer world is a world where people do things,experimental things, just about every day," Altman said. "Nothing hedid, or intended to do, had a premeditated or wrongful intent."With their potential for causing considerable economic damagewith almost total anonymity, virus writers have always occupied amystical position in the collective imagination.Hollywood likes to portray the virus writer as an evil,technopathic genius trapped in the body of a pale, pimply teenager,hunched at a computer in his suburban bedroom. But the truth couldnot be further from the image.Sociological studies of computer virus writers have found thatmost are highly educated, middle- to upper-middle-class males, with arespect for authority coupled to a contempt of hypocrisy, and healthyrelationships with parents, friends and girlfriends or wives.They enjoy problem-solving, are curious and invariably male. Ina decade's study into the subculture, Sara Gordon, a virus researcherfor IBM, found no females active in the field.Eastern Europe, in particular Bulgaria, is widely regarded asthe birthplace of virus writing, thanks to a huge army of young andhighly qualified but unemployed computer wizards, who because ofeconomic conditions had become adept at cracking thepiracy-protection codes on commercial software.After Bulgaria, the scene moved to Canada and the UnitedStates. Now, Australia, Sweden and Norway seem to dominate the virusscene.In 1995, Christopher Pile, a reclusive unemployed 26-year-oldBriton who called himself Black Baron, became the first person to bejailed for writing and distributing a virus.Pile, who was sentenced to 18 months, said he wanted toraise his self-esteem by creating a British virus to rival foreignones.He wrote two "polymorphic" viruses, able to change theircharacteristics each time they reproduced so that they could not bedetected by virus detection software.They wiped the computers they infected clean of data, afterdisabling the keyboard and taunting the user with a message: "Smokeme a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast . . . unfortunately some ofyour data won't."Most viruses do not destroy the computers they attack. Themotivation is often an intellectual challenge to beat virus detectorsand to highlight deficiencies in computer security.According to Gordon, "Justifications vary from `We do thisbecause we can' to `We do this because someone said we were notcapable of doing it.' " Mostly, she said, it is something they justdo without ever considering why."The impact of their actions is often seen, at least by them,as impacting machines, not other human beings," she said.Melissa did not destroy computer files, but it did clog upsystems. It appeared March 26 and spread rapidly around the world onMonday like a malicious chain letter. Disguised as an "importantmessage" from a friend or colleague, it caused computers to fire off50 infected messages, slowing e-mail systems to a crawl.With the proliferation of the Internet, virus writing hasbecome easier and the number of virus writers has grown dramatically.Anyone who has passed a basic computer class can adapt a virus andadd his name to it, and many people do so by using simple pieces ofcode available on the Internet.Melissa is one such virus, created by adapting one of manyviruses in circulation on the Internet, which exploit a simpleprogramming language used by many Microsoft programs.Such simplistic virus techniques are scorned by the hard coreof the community, particularly as very few copycat viruses reproduceefficiently, so although 17,000 viruses have been identified, only300 circulate in the wild.Most serious virusmakers do not release their creations intothe wild. Instead, they trade with virus groups and largely scorndestructive viruses in favor of viruses that display irritatinggraphics or snippets of text to declare their infiltration of acomputer. In doing so, they avoid prosecution.It is not a criminal offense to write a virus; the crime is todamage someone else's computer or the data stored on it by using avirus, or to incite others to spread viruses.Contributing: Associated Press
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