School for Hackers

When Onel de Guzman's thesis proposal, titled "E-mail Password Sender Trojan," was rejected by Manila's AMA Computer College in February, the thesis committee gave a distinctly nonscholarly reason. "This is illegal!" the school's dean fumed. De Guzman wanted to write a program to "steal and retrieve Internet accounts of the victim's computer," allowing people to use those stolen log-ins to access the Internet free. The response from a faculty member, scrawled in the margin of the page: "We do not produce burglars."

De Guzman never got academic credit for "E-mail Password Sender Trojan." But the proposal's mangled syntax--de Guzman described a program that "catched and retrieved all lose passwords that users can enjoy"--was a dead giveaway. The proposal appears to have been a blueprint for the Love Bug virus that wreaked havoc on e-mail systems around the world, from the Pentagon to the British Parliament, and caused as much as $15 billion in damage. The skinny 23-year-old de Guzman came out of hiding last week for a press conference at which he came close to admitting responsibility for the Love Bug onslaught. Did he unleash the virus? "It is possible," admitted de Guzman, who sported dark glasses and covered his face with a handkerchief. If he did it, he insisted, it was as a result of "youthful exuberance."

As unlikely as de Guzman may seem as a mastermind of the most virulent computer virus in history, it's no great surprise to law-enforcement officials that it appears to have been hatched on a campus in the developing world. They say small cells of hackers--some at colleges, others in contact only electronically--pose an unprecedented threat to the computer systems of the industrialized world. For some, computer mischief is an educational exercise, a way to hone their computer skills. Others do it for sport or profit or the fun of committing large-scale vandalism. And for a growing number, the motivation is ideological or nationalistic. Cybercops have begun focusing on a small number of hacker havens--similar to money-laundering havens--where lax or nonexistent laws, corrupt and incompetent authorities, and adept programmers conspire to pose a threat to computer systems worldwide.

AMA Computer College is a pioneer in Philippine computer education. It's an up-by-the-bootstraps kind of place, where young people in a poor country can strive for the middle class. But AMA is also home to GRAMMERSoft, an underground computer group that provides programming to small businesses and allegedly sells thesis projects and homework to other students. De Guzman was a GRAMMERSoft member. Michael Buen, 23, whose thesis (accepted by the school) allowed users to make many copies of a single file, may also have been. Officials suspect that the Love Bug was formed by combining de Guzman's and Buen's work. These common features are one clue pointing to GRAMMERSoft's involvement. Another: the group's name appears in the Love Bug's coding.