Posted by Virus Bulletin on Sep 17, 2015
This Throwback Thursday, we turn the clock back to July 1990, when VB looked at virus origins and some of the rare cases of attributable viruses.
This week saw the confession of a former teenage virus writer: the author of the Leprosy and Leprosy.B viruses, which afflicted computer users in the early 90s, confessed all on The Register, saying "I just wanted to prove to the scenesters that even an idiot who didn't really know how to program could write a virus."
The confession got us looking back through the VB archives where we stumbled across an article from 1990, written by none other than VB director, Dr. Jan Hruska, in which he noted that, while it is not easy to establish the origins of a computer virus, and it is rare that positive indicators as to authorship can be found by examining virus code, there are (or were, at the time) a number of notable exceptions to this.
Dr. Hruska's article looked at a number of cases of attribution, and predicted that "Computer viruses developed by terrorists and organised crime syndicates will probably make an appearance once their destructive capacity is realised and, significantly, once their potential as tools to commit fraud becomes more obvious."
Dr Hruska's article can be read here in HTML-format, or downloaded here as a PDF.
Posted on 17 September 2015 by Helen Martin
