
Love Bug worm's creator tracked down to repair shop in Manila - known
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52458765
======
PappaPatat
I would like to say thank you to him, since it opened a huge budget and
mandate for my security team at the time.

No more draining discussion if AV needed to be installed on particular
systems, the right to wipe any employees desk or laptop in case of "issues",
create outbound firewall rules (yes those where new, and yes it saved a lot of
damage 3 years later when Slammer hit, but that's another story) and budget to
install "monitoring services" on whatever we'd like.

The total data loss was limited, the costs of employees not being able to work
was a lot worst.

~~~
MithrilTuxedo
I guess that at the height of Windows market saturation.

I thought it was rude to pay for an OS and then have to pay separately for
software to protect that OS. It seemed off to me that the guy who wrote
Melissa got jail time, but nothing happened to those who sold the software
needed to run viruses.

I stopped having Windows installed after Slammer hit. After almost two decades
away, I got a job at a big American company that issues Windows laptops and
lo-and-behold there's some seperately purchsed AV software installed.

It makes the laptop a space heater. If I don't explicitly shut it down, the AV
software never drops below 30% CPU and the thing's fans never stop running.
They accidentally dropped AV for a couple weeks when they upgraded my machine
from Windows 7 to 10 and it shaved five minutes off a ~17 minute Maven build.
I'm one employ of tens or hundreds of thousands producing all this extraneous
waste heat.

My friends needle me about BitCoin's environmental impact. I ask them what the
overhead of AV has been.

~~~
notechback
The comparison of bitcoin Vs AV energy usage is a bit ridiculous. No one of
buying hundreds of GPUs to mine AV.

That said, both are wasteful and ultimately neither should exist.

~~~
LordDragonfang
>No one of buying hundreds of GPUs to mine AV

No, rather companies are buying _thousands_ of computers to install AV on.

Bitcoin miners are a actually a very small minority of computer users, whereas
AV results in an extra 10-30% power overhead (possibly more, if we factor in
that modern cpus throttle way down if not under load) for the majority of all
the corporate PCs in operation, to say nothing of home users.

Back of the napkin math suggests that the comparison is indeed ridiculous, but
only because AV usage absolutely _dwarfs_ bitcoin usage.

~~~
dzhiurgis
My pet peeve is VP9 on YouTube vs Chrome on MacOS. My original estimate lack
of codec on MacOS / YouTube's choice to drop x264 for high resolution videos
waste as much power as entire country Puerto Rico.

It's even impossible to play 8K YouTube videos on highest end MacBook and
Chrome. It's ironic that MKBHD uploading them without being able to play them
himself.

------
PostOnce
Cyberpunk, being broke and writing a virus to steal access passwords -- and
then he ends up running a phone repair stall, even more cyberpunk.

Reminds me of rtm's chapter in the book CYBERPUNK by Katie Hafner, pg's in
there too. Except neither of them are now broke and running a phone stall in
Manila.

~~~
Yajirobe
How the heck can someone talented enough to write a virus end up in a phone
repair shop?

~~~
dzhiurgis
Phone repair shop in Manilla is gonna be very different from repair shop in
western mall. In manilla they gonna resolder any component from a salvaged
phone, where in west you gonna buy a new case for it (probably exaggeration
from both ends).

My point is - it was quite exciting and interesting job for early 2000s,
probably paid ok too. There was some software to crack and occasionally write
something. Nowadays the hardware is much cheaper when adjusted for inflation,
but people still need the service. Jailbreak scene continues to exist too.

Also transitioning from writing a simple virus into production software is a
long long way.

------
bsanr2
Never seen a starker illustration of the idea that poverty anywhere eventually
makes itself everyone's problem. Dude just wanted affordable internet access,
and that was enough of an incentive for him to do something that accidentally
caused billions of dollars in losses around the world.

Here's a fun thought: was that _cheaper_ to the global community than whatever
infrastructural improvements that would have allowed de Guzman stable-enough
internet access to not seek out his infamous solution? What other situations
like this are there waiting in the wings, and would fixing _them_ cost more or
less than the alternative of letting those situations play out as they may?
Think how 9/11, terrorist attacks in general, are spurred on by groups
aggrieved by socioeconomic or cultural conditions; what would it cost to
placate them? Do we not because it would ultimately be more onerous?

~~~
acheron
> what would it cost to placate them?

You’ve only to pay ‘em the Danegeld and then you’ll get rid of the Dane!

~~~
bryanrasmussen
As a Dane I support this sentiment!

------
baxtr
_> He also created a title for the email attachment that would have global
appeal, tempting people across the world to open it. "I figured out that many
people want a boyfriend, they want each other, they want love, so I called it
that," he said._

Great product management

------
ackbar03
Its pretty fascinating how a lot of these technically adept hackers all tend
to come from relatively poor environments. Even now a lot of the security bug
bounty programs have a large proportion of Indians in relatively poverished
villages somewhere. Russia after the collapse of the soviet union produced a
ton of hackers. In China some of the most technically competent people I've
interacted with doing shady stuff with bots and REing games and what not come
from some random village. I'd say this is meritocracy working at its best and
something you'd only see in the online world

~~~
luma
I think the fact that you find more people in the world with technical talent
who are also poor has a lot to do with the fact that there are a lot more poor
people in the world than rich. If a talent is equally spread throughout
humanity, then one would expect most recipients of that talent to be poor.

~~~
dempedempe
But poor people also have unequal access to educational resources for learning
technical skills.

~~~
h0l0cube
And this is the perfect economic justification for free high-quality
education, with some form of acceleration for the best students. This is
especially in a country that has a high valued currency - as low and no-
skilled jobs that can be outsourced, will be outsourced - but really true for
any country as it only increases their talent pool. So if a country, like the
US, wants to improve productivity, they should have an education system much
like many places in Asia.

~~~
dempedempe
Yes. But I don't see what this has to do with the topic at hand?

~~~
h0l0cube
Not all replies have to be counter to the parent post. I was just riffing off
your parent post, much like you were. The topic of the thread being that the
poor have unequal access to education, but that exceptional talent may exist
within that cohort. I just wanted to emphasise the economic incentives of
universal access to educational opportunities.

------
soneca
The article starts with:

> _" Filipino Onel de Guzman, now 44, says he unleashed the Love Bug computer
> worm to steal passwords so he could access the internet without paying."_

But that's not true, according to the same article. That was just the first
one he created, then he created something different to spread around the
world. It doesn't say his intentions, but for sure it was not to steal local
passwords for internet access.

By the end of the article:

> _" He claims he initially sent the virus only to Philippine victims, with
> whom he communicated in chat rooms, because he only wanted to steal internet
> access passwords that worked in his local area._

 _However, in spring 2000 he tweaked the code, adding an auto-spreading
feature that would send copies of the virus to victims ' Outlook contacts,
using a flaw in Microsoft's Windows 95 operating system. He also created a
title for the email attachment that would have global appeal, tempting people
across the world to open it."_

------
deathanatos
> _The man behind the world 's first major computer virus outbreak_

> _The Love Bug pandemic began on 4 May, 2000._

The Melissa virus happened the year prior.[1] The Morris worm[2] happened in
1988. Also, interestingly, PG shows up in the article for that one,

> _It is usually reported that around 6,000 major UNIX machines were infected
> by the Morris worm; however, Morris ' colleague Paul Graham claimed, "I was
> there when this statistic was cooked up, and this was the recipe: someone
> guessed that there were about 60,000 computers attached to the Internet, and
> that the worm might have infected ten percent of them."_

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melissa_(computer_virus)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melissa_\(computer_virus\))

[2]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm)

~~~
nwallin
That jumped out at me too. There were a lot of others; Michelangelo got a lot
of press. I remember being in the doctor's office on March 6th 1992, and all
the computers' power switches were conspicuously taped shut and the
receptionist told me to not turn on the computer (that was like 6 feet behind
the counter) because the hard disk would get wiped.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelangelo_%28computer_virus...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelangelo_%28computer_virus%29)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_computer_viruses_a...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_computer_viruses_and_worms)

------
jwilk
> _he tweaked the code, adding an auto-spreading feature that would send
> copies of the virus to victims ' Outlook contacts, using a flaw in
> Microsoft's Windows 95 operating system._

What's the flaw?

~~~
jplayer01
Beyond the fact that W95 was a terrible POS security-wise, I can't find any
more detailed information with a brief Google search. I wish there was a site
that did in-depth analysis of how a virus worked and presented that technical
information for public readers.

edit: Although, this is decent
[https://malware.wikia.org/wiki/ILoveYou](https://malware.wikia.org/wiki/ILoveYou)

~~~
skrebbel
> W95 was a terrible POS

In their defense, it wasn't really designed for cash registers anyway.

~~~
syockit
Yes, but when you market yourself as a general purpose OS, someone is bound to
use it somewhere they deem to be a general purpose. Not to mention it's easier
for lay people to program things for Win95 than other OS due to availability
and also due to VB.

When I was a kid and saw an out of order POS was showing Win95 desktop (could
be NT. When did NT start having start menu?), I thought it was cool. I wanted
to play Solitaire on it while waiting for my mom to finish paying at some
other counter.

~~~
jonhohle
Whoosh! I believe the comment you replied to was a dad-joke level double
entendre.

> When did NT start having start menu?

Windows NT 4 in 1996 had a similar shell to Windows 95.

~~~
jplayer01
> Whoosh! I believe the comment you replied to was a dad-joke level double
> entendre.

That was a master level dad joke. I didn't realize either until reading your
comment.

------
aaron695
I was always impressed when they tracked down the Lahore based brothers behind
the world's first computer virus outbreak, Brain.

It was made easier by the fact they included their address and phone in the
code, back in the days when viruses were legal and everyone read the code.

Time did a Cyberpunk-esque classic write up at the time, but it is paywalled

[http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,968490,...](http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,968490,00.html)

Another blog- [https://nustscienceblog.wordpress.com/2015/05/12/the-
compute...](https://nustscienceblog.wordpress.com/2015/05/12/the-computer-
virus-from-lahore/)

------
ilaksh
He did it because he could not afford internet access.

Security is an economic problem.

The economy is a technical problem. Just like computer viruses.

That's what money is. A technology. We need to make it into a high technology.

~~~
londons_explore
I can not afford a helecopter...

The optics are a bit different there...

------
bdg
Can we change the thread title to reference ILOVEYOU instead? I thought the
article was about "Herbie", the TV show about a Volkswagen.

~~~
geerlingguy
I assumed we were going to hear about the mechanic who maintained Herbie and
is now making a living in a small car repair shop somewhere. Definitely a
strange title.

~~~
macinjosh
I have to admit I was slightly disappointed it wasn't that. But this is an
interesting story too.

------
ginko
It's weird that the BBC doesn't refer to the worm by it's more well-known
name: ILOVEYOU

~~~
lotsofpulp
ILOVEYOU malware is a less ambiguous headline and would result in fewer
clicks.

~~~
bostik
Let alone might get actually blocked by content-inspecting AV because
signatures are only added, not removed.

~~~
iso1210
Only in Scunthorpe

