📸

VIRUSES, WORMS, TROJANS, BOMBS

Early in 1988 two more viruses were discovered, both of them written for the Macintosh, a personal computer produced by Apple as the successor to its historic Apple II. The first became known as MacMag or, sometimes, Peace. It contained a ‘universal message of peace’ signed by Richard Brandow, the publisher of the MacMag Magazine, a Canadian publication for Mac users, and included a small drawing of the world autographed by the author of the virus, Drew Davidson. It had been programmed to display its peace message on 2 March 1988, the anniversary of the introduction of the Macintosh II.

Later it was discovered that the virus had apparently been included on a computer game shown at a meeting of a Macintosh users’ group in Montreal. A speaker at the meeting quite accidentally copied the virus on to a diskette, and subsequently infected a computer in the offices of Aldus, a Seattle-based software publisher, for whom he was doing some work. The company then – equally accidentally – copied the virus on to what was later described as ‘several thousand’ copies of a program called Freehand, which were then distributed to thousands of computer stores. After complaints from consumers, who were quite bewildered at receiving a peace message with their software, the company recalled 5,000 copies of the program.

The MacMag virus, though relatively widely distributed, was not malicious. After displaying its message, it removed itself from infected systems. Nevertheless, it served to demonstrate the speed and ease with which self-replicating programs could propagate. When questioned about the morality of his actions, Brandow was quoted as saying: ‘You can’t blame Einstein for Hiroshima.’

The second Macintosh virus to be reported in 1988 was called Scores and was more serious. On 19 April 1988 Electronic Data Systems (EDS) of Dallas, a subsidiary of General Motors, announced that twenty-four of its machines were infected with Scores. It was thought that it might have been written by an ex-employee, possibly for motives of revenge. The Scores virus infects the operating system and two standard files of Macintosh computers, then hides itself away in two more secret files that it creates. Two days after a system has been infected, the virus begins to spread to programs – like word processing, for instance. In particular, it looks for two specialist pro-

📸