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tion strategy. Brain was viable for a number of reasons: it didn’t do anything deliberately dangerous or even very obvious, so it wasn’t likely to get noticed. And when it climbed into the computer memory, it stayed there until the computer was switched off, targeting any other diskettes that were introduced into the computer.

Brain also contained a counter and it attempted to infect a new diskette after the computer operator had accessed it thirty-one times. Thereafter, it infected at every fourth use. The infection consisted of placing a copy of itself on to its new target.

The virus had one particularly ingenious trick. Normally the boot sector, where the virus was hiding, can be read by special programs known as ‘disk editors’. But Brain could evade detection. If someone tried to read the boot sector – and see Brain – it redirected them to the place where the original boot sector had been stored, so everything looked normal. This trick, which now takes other forms, has become known as ‘stealth’, after the Stealth bomber designed to evade radar detection.

It wasn’t difficult to trace the writers of Brain, as they had conveniently included their names, telephone numbers and address on their virus. The programmers were nineteen-year-old Basit Farooq Alvi and his twenty-six-year-old brother Amjad Farooq Alvi. Together they run a computer store in Lahore, Pakistan, called Brain Computer Services. They wrote the virus in 1986, they said, ‘for fun’. It was in all probability the first virus ever disseminated internationally.

Shortly after writing Brain, Basit had given a copy of the virus to an unidentified friend. The virus had travelled from Pakistan to North America via an unknown route, but undoubtedly carried quite innocently around the world on a diskette, finally reaching the University of Delaware. Like Joe Dellinger at A&M, who was surprised at how quickly his self-replicating programs had travelled, Basit and Amjad Alvi were startled to learn from US journalists that their little virus had emigrated all the way to America within one year.

The second documented virus attack occurred only a month later, in November 1987, on computers at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Unlike Brain, the virus at Lehigh was deliberately damaging. It kept a count of the number of files that it infected

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