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6
Hacking for Profit

Inevitably there are some people in the computer underworld who use their skills to make money – legally or illegally. Hacking into suppliers to steal goods, or looting credit card companies, has become established practice.

But there seems little commercial potential in viruses: electronic vandalism by itself is hardly lucrative. In December 1989, though, the first attempt to use viruses as a weapon, to frighten computer users into paying for protection, was attempted. It was, to all intents and purposes, extortion.

Jim Bates, a freelance computer security consultant, was one of the first to examine the blackmail demand carried on an apparently ordinary computer diskette. He had received a call earlier that day from Mark Hamilton, the technical editor of a British computer magazine called PC Business World. Mark had sounded worried:
‘There’s apparently a trojan diskette been sent out to PC Business World customers. We don’t know anything about it. If we send you a copy, can you look into it?’

Jim is a self-employed computer security expert, specializing in viruses. He was forty-eight at the time, and ran his little business from his home in a commuter suburb with the misleadingly bucolic name of Wigston Magna, near Leicester, in the English Midlands. Though he had other work on at the time, and knew he would have to put it aside, he agreed to ‘look into it’ – which meant, effectively, disassembling the bug. It would be a time-consuming task.

‘What’s it do?’ he asked.
‘We don’t know. It may be some sort of blackmail attempt.’

To Jim, the concept of viral blackmail sounded unlikely. As far as he knew no one had ever made a penny out of writing viruses. It was

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