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viruses written by the Dark Avenger. A family of perhaps twenty or more viruses can now be attributed to him, all technically advanced, most deliberately malicious. Some contain text strings that use the titles of Iron Maiden tracks: Somewhere in Time, The Evil that Men Do and The Good Die Young are all cuts on various Iron Maiden albums as well as phrases that appear in the Dark Avenger's bugs. His viruses also mimic the posturing Satanism of heavy metal music. His Number of the Beast virus (the name is yet another reference to an Iron Maiden track) contains the three-byte signature 666, the mystical number believed to refer to the beast, the Anti-christ in the Book of Revelations.

Perhaps appropriately, of all the viruses attributed to the Dark Avenger, Number of the Beast is conceded to be the most technically accomplished. A stealth virus, it exploits an obscure feature of the standard PC operating system to evade detection and hides in unused space on program files. In this way it doesn't change the length of the host file. Oddly, the virus doesn't have a payload, though its mere presence on a PC is likely to cause it to crash.

The Dark Avenger has produced four versions of Eddie and six versions of Number of the Beast, as well as four variants of a virus called Phoenix and four of another called Anthrax (also the name of an American heavy metal group). He is also generally believed to have written Nomenklatura, the virus that attacked Britain's House of Commons library. He is suspected principally because the bug is technically sophisticated and vicious - attributes that point to the Dark Avenger - and because it uses some techniques that have been seen in his other viruses. In a way, the Dark Avenger has become so well known that any particularly destructive and clever Bulgarian virus will almost automatically be attributed to him. The alternative is too dire for the computer security industry to contemplate.

The Dark Avenger's fame was evident in the response to his calls to the world's first virus exchange bulletin board started in Sofia by twenty-year-old Todor Todorov on 1 November 1990. The idea was to be copied by others in Britain, Italy, Sweden, Germany, the US and even the USSR, but Sofia's was the first. Todorov is proud of that. The board describes itself as a place for free exchange of viruses

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