Recent days have been the worst ever for people protecting against digital nasties. Never before has the world seen such a barrage of viruses attacking home and business computers alike.
It started with the Blaster worm, breaking into computers if they connected to the Internet without having a "patch" correcting a critical hole in Microsoft's Windows code. Blaster caused computers to grind to a halt by forcing Windows XP to reboot computers every few minutes, making work impossible.
Around Aug. 12, Blaster began spreading rapidly because so many people thought you could get a virus only via e-mail and had not downloaded the patch from Microsoft. One inventive author even wrote an anti-Blaster worm called Nachi, which attempted to clean up infections of the earlier worm and put Microsoft's patch in place. However, it only ended up causing more disruption to networks as it ran without the permission of users. "Good" viruses are always a bad idea.
Then last week, an e-mail-aware worm called SoBig.F plowed through the Internet, rapidly becoming the fastest-spreading virus of all time and generating millions of viral e-mail messages. Companies found their e-mail systems grinding to a halt, while some home users received up to 6,000 infected messages in their inbox.
On Friday, the New York Times temporarily shut down its computer systems, reportedly because of a viral threat.
Who are the people behind this computerized chaos?
The names of well-known virus authors such as the Black Baron, Dark Avenger and Nowhere Man -- who were famous in the '90s -- may strike fear into the hearts of some computer users, but who is behind the SoBig, Blaster and Nachi viruses that have been harassing computer users for the last couple of weeks? Are they, as some people imagine, evil purple-haired geniuses cackling maniacally in their back bedrooms, "Die Hard"-style European cyberterrorists set on global domination?
The truth is rather more mundane.
First, it is remarkably easy to write a virus -- certainly not the preserve of a genius. Jan de Wit, the kid from the Netherlands who wrote the Anna Kournikova worm, claimed to have no detailed computer skill and simply downloaded a virus construction kit off a South American Web site. In the blink of an eye he had created a virus that lured users to double-click by using pictures of the tennis temptress.
