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THE BULGARIAN THREAT

Terror and Manowar. Despite their names, neither was particularly damaging. In total, Peter wrote around twenty-six 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),6 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 at university in Sofia. Their first bug was programmed to make a shuffling noise, like the rustling of paper, while he was lecturing. This virus and a subsequent variant (which borrowed the bouncing-ball payload from Ping Pong) became known as Murphy 1 and Murphy 2.7 Highly infectious, they spread throughout Bulgaria and in 1991 reached the West.

Many other programmers and students took a stab at writing viruses, some with more proficiency than others. 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), mostly aged between eighteen and twenty-eight, probably unknown to each other, who had learned the tricks of writing viruses through the techniques perfected when the country was stealing Western software.

In late 1990 and early 1991 Bulgaria itself, no longer Communist and not quite democratic, was going through a crisis of identity. 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 black-marketeers 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 which President Zhivkov 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 very heart of the system. Viruses would cripple Zhivkov's dream. In this grey time of shortages and rationing,

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