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was suggested that the author of Casino could be an American, or perhaps a Maltese who had previously lived in the States. But, as in many cases, his identity was never discovered.

Casino epitomized many of the characteristics of the new breed of viruses: it was vicious, destructive, and its payload was curiously spiteful. To date, the virus hasn’t spread from its island home, though that doesn’t mean it won’t travel in the future.

It is estimated that a virus that is going to travel will reach its peak propagation within eighteen months. (Casino is thought to have been written in late 1990.) About half of the viruses ever written are less than six months old: they are, in a manner of speaking, now waiting for their travel documents, for that odd confluence of luck and circumstance that will unleash them throughout the world.

As the world population of computer viruses grows exponentially, the potential of real disaster mounts. Viruses will affect computer users first, but then – indirectly – many people who have never even touched a computer. A virus let loose in a hospital computer could affect records, and patients could receive a wrong dosage of medicine; workers could suffer job losses in virus-ravaged businesses; dangerous emissions could be released from nuclear plants if the controlling computers were compromised. Even military operations could be affected. Already, during the 1991 Gulf conflict, allied forces had to contend with at least two separate virus assaults affecting over 7,000 computers. One of the incidents was caused by the ubiquitous Jerusalem bug, the other by a ‘fun’ virus from New Zealand called Stoned, which displayed the message ‘Your PC is now stoned’ on the screen. The two outbreaks were enough to cause computer shutdowns and some loss of data.

The Stoned virus itself spawned a number of variants, one of which seemed for a time to be the long-awaited doomsday bug. It first appeared in late 1991, and was programmed to wipe out hard disks on 6 March – the anniversary of Michelangelo’s birth.

The virus – dubbed, inevitably, Michelangelo – travelled widely throughout Europe, North and South America, South Africa and the Far East. Its ubiquitousness led to claims that it would infect some 5 million computers and that, on 6 March, many of these would suffer irrecoverable losses of data. In the event, after warnings from the

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