Attack Of The Love Bug

• Share

(5 of 6)

The drama wasn't over yet. By Thursday night, more than a day after its first appearance, the Love Bug began to mutate. Either the creator or, more likely, other members of the virus-writing clan started editing the virus and reintroducing it to the Internet with some new, tilted spins. One version had the subject line "FWD: Joke." Another was written in Lithuanian. One, more devious, bore the subject header "Mother's Day Order Confirmation"--posing as an e-mail receipt for a credit-card transaction for flowers or a gift for Mom. Perhaps most diabolical of all was the version titled "Dangerous Virus Warning," with an attached file that cleansed the system of the Love Bug but substituted an equally dangerous one of its own.

As the initial outbreak cooled down by midday Friday, the search for its author heated up. Filipino virus hunters, working in cooperation with the FBI and local authorities, determined that the virus had originally been released from two e-mail addresses, spyder@super.net.ph and mailme@super.net.ph both belonging to Supernet, an ISP based in Manila. The identity behind the two accounts proved difficult to trace--the perpetrator had used a series of faked and stolen e-mail addresses and anonymous, prepaid Internet-access cards.

By late Saturday, authorities had targeted two suspects: a 23-year-old Filipino student attending Amable Mendoza Aguiluz Computer College and living in the Pandacan district of Manila; and a twentysomething German exchange student living in Australia, known variously on the Internet as Michael and Mikael.

It is tempting to romanticize virus makers as brilliant, rogue hackers in the cyberpunk tradition of William Gibson's science fiction. Experts agree, though, that the Love Bug is at best the work of a resourceful plagiarist. "It isn't like you have to be a genius," says Tippett. "This is just a guy who's been connected to the virus community for a while. He took pieces from three or four viruses that came out this year and glommed them together."

Even if the authorities catch up with "spyder," and administrators succeed in mopping up the Love Bug and all its evil progeny, what kind of future is there for an Internet so fragile that a cobbled-together program can bring it to its knees? It is painfully obvious that the present network lacks any built-in immune system to defend it against malicious infections. Emmanuel Goldstein, founder of the legendary hacker journal 2600, stresses that better technology is the answer--not passing more laws or throwing more hackers in prison. "Melissa should have protected us from this," he said at a 2600 gathering Friday night. "Catching the guy doesn't prevent hackers. All the legislation in the world will not stop a 12-year-old in Thailand from doing this."