Ding! Whrrrrrrrrrrrr. Crash!

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt

You had to be completely out of touch -- or heavily sedated -- all last week not to have got the word. Bulletins were broadcast hourly from TV and radio stations around the world. Warnings were issued by the FBI, by London's Scotland Yard and by Japan's international trade ministry. Schoolchildren carried home notes from concerned teachers. Computer owners queued up at software outlets, their brows creased in anxious frowns.

It was the largest computer-virus scare to date -- a week-long frenzy of hype and high-tech hand-holding that dramatized the vulnerability of the world's 137 million personal computers -- and the gullibility of their users. In the end, the bug's bark was worse than its bite. The National Computer Security Association in Washington reported that 15 computers had been struck in England, 12 in the Netherlands and five in Austria. There were disruptions in Japan, China and New Zealand. Several hundred computers used by South Africa's pharmacists were zapped. But except for a Southern Baptist church near Atlanta, which lost all its data, and a few scattered businesses, damage reported in the U.S. was minimal. The number of affected computers was probably a few thousand worldwide -- a far cry from the up to 5 million that experts had been warning of all week.

If the computer world experienced that feeling of letdown that comes when a well-publicized hurricane fails to hit, nobody could blame the object at the center of the storm -- the tiny computer program called Michelangelo. Like all other computer viruses, it was designed to hide within a computer's instructions and spread to other systems by copying itself over and over. But while most computer viruses do benign things -- such as whistle Yankee Doodle -- Michelangelo is pernicious. It was programmed to wipe out all the data in any infected IBM-compatible personal computer on March 6, Michelangelo's birthday.

Who creates these things? A disproportionate number seem to originate in Bulgaria or Russia, where writing the smallest, most elegant virus programs has become a matter of quirky pride. But Michelangelo was first discovered just over a year ago on the other side of the world, in Australia, among some Taiwanese floppy disks. The virus drew special attention in the U.S. after several shipments of commercial software became infected.

All the publicity clearly helped reduce the damage to U.S. computers. It certainly didn't hurt the group with the most to gain: the folks who make their living providing protection against virus attacks. Central Point Software in Beaverton, Ore., for example, reported that sales of its $129 antiviral program jumped 700% in one month. Central Point gave away thousands of copies of another, smaller program designed to destroy Michelangelo and a second virus set to strike this week, on Friday the 13th. But included in that freebie was a clever marketing tool for the company's full-powered program: a list of 1,007 other viruses that could still be lurking in the soul of your machine.

With reporting by David S. Jackson/San Francisco, with other bureaus