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Damage, Delyrium, Demon, Diabolik, Enigma, Erasmus, Greemlin, HIV, Lucifer, Pest . . . all listed in alphabetical order. There are now twenty-five to thirty of them. Cracker Jack’s viruses are showcased on a virus exchange board in Merano, in northern Italy. The system operator, Mauro, will provide details of the bugs: ‘Pest has coding for file deletion . . . Delyrium makes low-level formats . . . Enigma formats track number 20 . . . Greemlin overwrites track 0 . . . Lucifer’s only effect is to display a message but the program doesn’t run correctly and sometimes corrupts files . . . Damage formats track 0: it is a stealth virus . . .’ Honest Mauro, used-virus salesman.

In Germany virus writing has been automated. A group called the Verband Deutscher Virenliebhaber (Community of German Virus Lovers) has produced a virus construction set. It will solve the problem for those ‘who want to give a virus to their worst enemy but have none to hand’. The set allows novices to create their own unique virus with a personalized message. In the best hacker tradition, the Hamburg group supplies the set free, but users who like it are asked to donate DM20 to the Red Cross.

And the virus the Dark Avenger had promised in his message on Fidonet duly appeared in May 1991. He called it the Mutating Engine and it may well be able to disguise itself in 4 billion different ways.

A virus like the Mutating Engine, which can continually change its appearance, is potentially the most difficult to detect. It contains no constant characteristic, like a text string, that could be used by virus scanners to register its presence. All that can be detected of the Mutating Engine is a mass of encrypted code – a code that changes its encryption every time it infects a file.

It may be the most dangerous virus ever produced. And it wasn’t just a virus: it was also a routine that other programmers could build into their own bugs. In December 1991 the Dark Avenger contacted a private board in England, offering to sell the source code for his virus. As far as is known, nobody was buying. So in May 1992 the Dark Avenger simply released the source code to the computer underworld – for free.

And the Dark Avenger now has competition from the East. The Russians are developing whole families of clever and malicious bugs,

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