Oscar Luft. What was Laurel’s surname? I didn’t know. But that her son should be Oscar Luft …
I pride myself on my filing system. I keep things that may come in handy, one day. I have a pantry of filing cabinets. It didn’t take me long to find what I needed, under B for Blackhat. A plastic envelope of cuttings, getting on for three years old. A bit faded, but the lad in the photographs, that same kouros smile; I had no doubt it was Laurel’s Oscar. He was in the news because a computer virus he’d written as a schoolboy had shut down the Australian Tax Office for three days. The virus was called Genericus. There’s a kind of illiteracy and yet ambition about these names that disturbs me. Of course this one is famous, but I had not known it began with Oscar. The newspaper articles were written for the ignorant; they did their best to describe what a virus was: a malicious program that can alter, damage or destroy files and computer memory. A rogue program that behaves in the same manner as a biological virus, multiplying and spreading from computer to computer via infected floppy discs, or over the Internet, or by downloading infected programs. All the images in terms of human disease. Useful for the layman.
So that was young Oscar. Not one of my favourite kinds of people. He wouldn’t like me to get my hands on him.
The journalist quotes him as saying he has no knowledge of this attack on the tax office, since it’s two years since he had anything to do with his virus. By this time he’s in second year at university. It’s a ghost from the past come back to haunt me , he says. I thought it was dead and buried long ago.
Instead of which, it had spread around the world, since his first version of it shut down a couple of banks as well as getting into his school system – grammar, I noted – and went on to become one of the most prevalent viruses in the world. Oscar tells the journalist that this is all a mystery to him; he’d shown his schoolmates some of the codes and somebody stole them. He’d contacted one of the anti-virus companies and offered them the codes so they could deal with it but they just called the police.
So why had he written it? Since he claimed innocence of any malice.
As a programming exercise. He learnt a lot writing it, but never intended it should get into circulation. He kept claiming it was never meant as a destructive virus, it didn’t have a destructive code, but because of an oversight on his part there was a flaw in it which could corrupt some kinds of files.
The angelic innocence of it all. Well, maybe.
He kept on insisting, article after article, the press had taken up this youthful hacker in a big way, that he had no idea how it had got into the tax office computers, it was all so long ago, but he was shocked that it had, it ought to have been picked up by modern anti-virus software, he was horrified and amazed that it hadn’t been. But even so, given that it had got in, it shouldn’t have taken days to get rid of, only hours.
Some lad, this Oscar. The police didn’t actually charge him, on this occasion, or earlier. His associates, said the journalist, described him as a genius, who probably knew more about viruses than just about anybody in the world. Oscar himself said he wasn’t interested any more in writing viruses, he was much keener on combating them. It was much harder to stop a virus than write one. He tried to get a job with anti-virus companies but they didn’t trust him.
Hardly surprising. As it wasn’t that his mother should worry about him. But then, a lot of us do things at fifteen or sixteen that we regret later. I should know.
Normally … ha. I look at the word. What is normal? Normal now or normal then? Normal now is this bare bright room where the movement of the light is the grand event, and Leonie’s bum parked on the page where my pen writes. Pen, you notice. My sweetly scented cat, whose fur smells of sun-dried washing, who purrs when
I pride myself on my filing system. I keep things that may come in handy, one day. I have a pantry of filing cabinets. It didn’t take me long to find what I needed, under B for Blackhat. A plastic envelope of cuttings, getting on for three years old. A bit faded, but the lad in the photographs, that same kouros smile; I had no doubt it was Laurel’s Oscar. He was in the news because a computer virus he’d written as a schoolboy had shut down the Australian Tax Office for three days. The virus was called Genericus. There’s a kind of illiteracy and yet ambition about these names that disturbs me. Of course this one is famous, but I had not known it began with Oscar. The newspaper articles were written for the ignorant; they did their best to describe what a virus was: a malicious program that can alter, damage or destroy files and computer memory. A rogue program that behaves in the same manner as a biological virus, multiplying and spreading from computer to computer via infected floppy discs, or over the Internet, or by downloading infected programs. All the images in terms of human disease. Useful for the layman.
So that was young Oscar. Not one of my favourite kinds of people. He wouldn’t like me to get my hands on him.
The journalist quotes him as saying he has no knowledge of this attack on the tax office, since it’s two years since he had anything to do with his virus. By this time he’s in second year at university. It’s a ghost from the past come back to haunt me , he says. I thought it was dead and buried long ago.
Instead of which, it had spread around the world, since his first version of it shut down a couple of banks as well as getting into his school system – grammar, I noted – and went on to become one of the most prevalent viruses in the world. Oscar tells the journalist that this is all a mystery to him; he’d shown his schoolmates some of the codes and somebody stole them. He’d contacted one of the anti-virus companies and offered them the codes so they could deal with it but they just called the police.
So why had he written it? Since he claimed innocence of any malice.
As a programming exercise. He learnt a lot writing it, but never intended it should get into circulation. He kept claiming it was never meant as a destructive virus, it didn’t have a destructive code, but because of an oversight on his part there was a flaw in it which could corrupt some kinds of files.
The angelic innocence of it all. Well, maybe.
He kept on insisting, article after article, the press had taken up this youthful hacker in a big way, that he had no idea how it had got into the tax office computers, it was all so long ago, but he was shocked that it had, it ought to have been picked up by modern anti-virus software, he was horrified and amazed that it hadn’t been. But even so, given that it had got in, it shouldn’t have taken days to get rid of, only hours.
Some lad, this Oscar. The police didn’t actually charge him, on this occasion, or earlier. His associates, said the journalist, described him as a genius, who probably knew more about viruses than just about anybody in the world. Oscar himself said he wasn’t interested any more in writing viruses, he was much keener on combating them. It was much harder to stop a virus than write one. He tried to get a job with anti-virus companies but they didn’t trust him.
Hardly surprising. As it wasn’t that his mother should worry about him. But then, a lot of us do things at fifteen or sixteen that we regret later. I should know.
Normally … ha. I look at the word. What is normal? Normal now or normal then? Normal now is this bare bright room where the movement of the light is the grand event, and Leonie’s bum parked on the page where my pen writes. Pen, you notice. My sweetly scented cat, whose fur smells of sun-dried washing, who purrs when
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