I ran across the following article, and it set me to wondering--did Dr. Cohen actually publish on 'computer viruses' before anybody else? He continues to use it as the bedrock of his reputation capital, so if this pre-dates his 'seminal' article, please let me know. Included message: For Liz Bass or Reg Gale Discovery 9:31 AM Friday, April 5, 1996 By Lou Dolinar This is still my favorite computer story. I'm not saying it was the first piece ever written about computer viruses, but I won't say that it isn't. I still have the original, dated April 16, 1985. In some ways I wish I hadn't written it, because it was posted and reposted on bulltetin boards all over the U.S., and seems to have subsequently inspired a whole generation of virus writers. Note to kids: back then, most computers didn't have hard disks, and started up from floppies, hence floppy based viruses were a big deal. As usual, The Hacker wasn't paying for his midnight phone call; he had stolen the line from one of the long distance phone services. What's up? I asked. The 17-year-old snickered. Doom was ahead for all Apple II owners. "Don't engage in casual disk-copying with strangers," he said. "You might catch an operating-system virus." Now the hacker has a pretty hefty national rep in the computer underground, so when he talks about this crazy stuff, it's worth listening. I've seen whole collections of pirated games software bearing his nom de hack, and his black-bag jobs on mainframes would curl your hair. In case you're not familiar with software piracy, manufacturers build protection schemes into their programs to prevent people from making illegal copies and siphoning their profits. Dedicated pirates like my friend spend hours, sometimes days, cracking these schemes then release them, illegally, free, to the public over a network of electronic bulletin boards that can be reached with a phone, a computer and a modem. The Hacker always imprinted his name, electronically, on the game that he cracked ("Cracked by The Hacker, July 4, 1978"). And therein lies this tale. A couple of years back, he recalled, some teenagers in the Milwaukee area stole his stolen programs and released them under their own names. Why bother, you ask? Because the hacker whose name the stolen program bears receives the "credit" for having cracked the piracy protected program and, thus, is viewed with some degree of appreciation by similarly larcenous wizards in the computer underground. The Hacker was outraged and plotted a diabolical revenge: A wizard of code, he constructed ted what he calls an "operating system virus" for the Apple II computer. The operating system, you may know, loads into the computer before the program and controls the functions of the computer. The Hacker modified the operating system erase whatever disks were in the computer after they had been used 25 times. Not only that, but the "virus" would attache itself to any other discs that were loaded during the particular session of computer use. Thus,k if you played a "virus" carrying pirated game, and then went on to use your $495 word processor and $795 data-base program, these too would be infected and would cash after their 25th use--and in the meantime, they would be spreading the "virus." Like any disease, then, Killer-DOS, as The Hacker dubbed it, has a latency period, which allowed it to spread to other "victims" He inserted it into a recently cracked games program, put it on an electronic bulletin board frequented by the Minneapolis crowd, and sat back to watch the fun. A couple of months later, whole libraries of disks were begin wiped out as the "disease" spread. Now Killer-DOS is common knowledge in the underground, it it wasn't the reason The Hacker called. It seems he had, in a frenzy of anti-social behavior, created a particularly virulent form of Killer-DOS that didn't crash until it had been loaded 150 times---with a longer latency period, the potential number of victims rises geometrically. But conscience prevailed. The Hacker decided not to release the bug. Then, however, just like the Andromeda Strain, the bug got loose anyway--the Killer-DOS disk got mixed in with "healthy" programs, disks that he has been handing out for the last couple of years and are now all over the country. So if you find a worm in your Apple, don't say you haven't been warned.