Market Focus : Former East Bloc Battles Outbreak of Computer Viruses : Disgruntled, low-paid programmers are blamed for some of them. Now the contagion is going global.
You are working away at your computer when suddenly an ambulance pops up on your screen and drives across it, sirens blaring.
Or the text on your screen bends sickeningly, then flips over into a mirror image. Or you discover your most precious, irreplaceable data has vanished into never-never land.
You have a computer virus. And, if you’re doing business with Russia, chances are you have contracted one of 1,000-odd nasty new infections that are running amok across the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
Most of these viruses, like those created in the West, are the work of teen-age nerds trying to strut their stuff before their programmer peers, said Dmitri N. Lozinsky, a Moscow mathematician who has become Russia’s most famous virus-hunter.
But a few are the work of unemployed, underemployed or miserably paid East European and Russian programmers who are bitter that their talents are neither appreciated nor rewarded, according to Lozinsky and his colleagues.
In the West, a computer programmer innovative enough to produce a clever virus--or a video game like Tetris, which was invented in Moscow--would likely be supplementing a six-figure salary with plush stock options.
In the former Soviet Union, such a programmer would be lucky to be earning $500 a month.
“It’s a country where talented people are no longer valued,” said Sergei G. Antimonov, general director of the software company DialogScience Inc. “People who have been offended and feel humiliated want to get revenge.”
Writing a computer virus is one way to thumb one’s nose at the computer Establishment. It’s been made easier in Russia since a computer magazine published the text of one virus, inspiring hundreds of copycats.
“Viruses seem to be all over Moscow,” complained Robert Harris, an economist who had never seen one until his notebook computer was infected during a trip to Russia last spring. Harris has now moved to Moscow and says his offices at the Barents Group, a subsidiary of the accounting giant Peat Marwick, have suffered periodic viral assaults.
Today, the risk of electronic infection has become another hazard of life in the new Russian business world--along with bribe-gouging bureaucrats, Stalin-era telephones, predatory gangsters and monster traffic jams.
Russian computers are teeming with viruses that have attacked research institutions, banks, government offices and even a space-launch center, industry sources said.
And now that scores of new Russian businesses are making intimate computer contact with each other and with their Western partners, the risk of contagion is increasing: The former Soviet Union is catching e-mail fever, with thousands of new users logging on to GlasNet and other on-line services that permit cheap, easy exchanges of information--and viruses--around the globe.
“Viruses from the (former) East Bloc countries pose a considerable threat to computers in the U.S.A.,” wrote Florida-based computer expert Wolfgang Stiller in an on-line computer forum devoted to this mushrooming problem.
Not surprisingly, the people who know the most about computer viruses are those who make a living curing them.
The good news is that these maladies, spread via infected floppy disks or contaminated programs downloaded from computer bulletin boards, can be diagnosed by new anti-virus programs on the market in the United States, as well as by virus sleuth Lozinsky’s program, named Aidstest, industry sources said.
“The bad news is that some of the most destructive and creative code is coming from the East Bloc countries, and we see no indication that this flood of new viruses will abate,” Stiller warned, nevertheless. “If the existing techniques are further developed, they could be combined and create a virus that could spread very widely and cause massive damage before it is detected.”
But as fast as the computer viruses multiply and go forth, the makers of Aidstest hunt them down. The program, invented by Lozinsky six years ago after his laboratory was paralyzed by an attack, has become the most popular virus-killer in the former Soviet Union.
In Moscow, viruses are multiplying so fast that DialogScience Inc., the company that markets Aidstest, sends a program update to 1,500 subscribers once a week, said Antimonov, its director.
Users who bring DialogScience a virus that the latest version of Aidstest does not kill are rewarded with a free copy of a new program that will cure it, Antimonov said.
About 4,000 computer viruses have been identified throughout the world, Lozinsky said, and about 1,000 of them hail from the former East Bloc. Bulgaria is the home of an infamous, particularly malevolent virus writer who calls himself the Dark Avenger.
Russia is a latecomer on the virus scene--having first imported destructive, self-replicating viruses in foreign-made personal computers. Now, more and more new viruses have Russian names like Volga, Minsk, Kiev, Kamchatka, Estonia and Pravda. There is even a computer virus called GKChP, the acronym for the committee of hard-liners that seized power from former Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev in the failed coup of August, 1991.
Most of these infections are primitive, clumsily written or blatant imitations of other viruses, Lozinsky said, dismissing their authors as “illiterates.”
A virus that appeared three years ago but has been maddening innocent computer users across Moscow calls itself Form. A “boot sector” virus, it lies quietly in a computer until the 24th of each month, when it activates itself and begins beeping every time a key is depressed. Typing produces a cacophony.
Only about 10% of computer viruses produce visual effects, Lozinsky said. The nastiest ones are designed to lie low in a computer for weeks or months, to allow plenty of time for them to be spread to floppy disks and infect other users.
The viruses then begin corrupting data--but so gradually it often takes weeks before a victim notices. By then, even careful users who back up files find that the archived data has been ruined too.
To banks and other users whose data is far more valuable than their computers, these viruses are far more dangerous than the better-known variety, called bombs or Trojan horses, that can suddenly erase a hard disk.
Writing and circulating viruses is not illegal in Russia, and the Soviet-era legal code that remains in force here makes it practically impossible to sue a virus creator or disseminator for damages, he said.
As the protective programs have grown more shrewd, so have the virus writers. In 1991, according to Discover magazine, the Bulgarian Dark Avenger crafted a program, Mutating Engine, that lets a virus change its appearance every time it infects a file--and thus escape detection by most anti-virus scanning programs. The Dark Avenger posted his work on an electronic billboard where any would-be vandal could copy it--and plenty did.
Discover reported that Mutating Engine “may be the most dangerous virus ever produced.”
Russian and Western anti-virus companies responded with a new generation of programs that even spot viruses in disguise. Florida expert Stiller’s company, Stiller Research of Tallahassee, charges $39.95 for a program, Integrity Master, designed to kill off “polymorphic” viruses. A number of Western competitors market similar software.
DialogScience sells its new programs, Advanced Diskinfoscope and Dr. Web, together with the Aidstest scanner, for the ruble equivalent of $20. The company has yet to find an American distributor, but its programs have recently been released on CD-ROM in Germany. (In the English- and German-language editions, Aidstest has been renamed V-Hunter.)
If only computer users would buy such programs and use them systematically, “viruses could practically be wiped out,” Lozinsky said.
Most systems get infected when their users copy software from friends. Though Russia has a new intellectual property law that technically bans software such piracy, the message that duplicating copyrighted software copying is theft has not yet penetrated here.
Ironically, Aidstest itself may be the most widely pirated program in the former Soviet Union. Though DialogScience sells only about 10,000 copies a year, it estimates that some version of the program has been copied onto 1 million of Russia’s 3 million computers.
Meanwhile, unwary Western computer users who do business here are getting burned--and getting smart.
“I’m very cautious,” said economist Harris. “I just spent two full days cleaning up the machines in our office because none of them was functioning, and I don’t want to do that again.”
Harris said older versions of two popular American anti-virus programs failed to detect the latest interloper, although both the latest version of Aidstest and a program called F-PROT were able to kill it.
“Moral: Do not forget to update your virus tools regularly,” Harris concluded. “Virus writers do not seem to sleep.”
Computer newsletter publisher Esther Dyson, president of EDventure Holdings Inc. in New York and a frequent visitor to Russia, says the average American computer user is not at high risk from Russian-made viruses--but should not use pirated programs or insert floppy disks of uncertain provenance.
This is the computer equivalent of having sex with a stranger, since “you don’t know where it’s been,” Dyson said.
Computer hygiene is especially important in public places like the Internet, she said. “People are sneezing all around you and doing lewd things, and there’s stuff on there that’s catching,” Dyson said. “And Russia has a very creative software community, and some of them don’t have enough to do.”
