Approaching Zero by Paul Mungo (bts book recommendations .txt) đź“–
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for the license was to be sent to PC Cyborg Corporation at a post office box in
Panama City, Panama. It was not specified what users would receive for the fee,
apart from a license. But it was assumed that an antidote for the trojan would
be included in the deal.
The AIDS information diskette was the largest and most complex trojan Jim had
ever seen. He worked on it eighteen hours a day for seventeen days and later
said that taking the program apart was “like peeling an onion with a paper
clip.” His final disassembly ran to 383 pages, each containing 120 lines of
code. He had managed to produce a quick antidote to the AIDS trojan on the day
he received it, but after he had disassembled the bug, he put together a
program called ClearAid which would restore files and cleanse infected systems.
The antidote and ClearAid were offered free to infected computer users by Jim
and PC Business World.
Later, when the furor died down, Jim decided that the trojan had been written
“by a young, inexperienced programmer with only scant knowledge of both the
language and the machine capabilities at his disposal.” Its tortuous complexity
had been caused by incompetence rather than design.
This was little comfort for those who had suffered damage from the bug. Over
twenty thousand of the AIDS diskettes had been
sent out, using not only the PC Business World mailing list, but the delegate
register to a World Health Organization (WHO) conference on AIDS in Stockholm.
In the first few days, a number of recipients had panicked when they realized
that they had just loaded a potentially destructive trojan onto their systems.
The trojan had caused the loss of data at the U.N. Development Program offices
in Geneva, and in Italy an AIDS research center at the University of Bologna
reported the loss of ten years of research. Like many users, they had not kept
backup copies of their valuable data. The trojan reached hospitals and clinics
throughout Europe, and the Chase Manhattan Bank and International Computers
Limited (ICL) in England both reported unspecified “problems” caused by the
program. In every instance, scientists, researchers, and computer operators
wasted days chasing down and eliminating the bug, even after Jim’s antidote and
ClearAid program became generally available.
At New Scotland Yard the Computer Crime Unit under Detective Inspector John
Austen established that all twenty thousand diskettes had been posted from west
and southwest London, between December 7 and I I, 1989, and that they had been
sent to addresses in almost every country of the world, with one glaring
exception: none had been sent to the United States.
The Computer Crime Unit does not have an easy job.
In many cases it has been frustrated by the unusual nature of computer crime,
and with viruses it has been noticeably unsuccessful in bringing prosecutions.
Most viruses are written abroad, by unknown and certainly untraceable authors,
often in countries such as Bulgaria where the act itself is not a criminal
offense. To prosecute a case against a virus writer, the unit must have a
complaint against the author from a victim in Britain, evidence of criminal
intent, proof of the author’s identity, and finally, his presence in Britain,
or at least in a country from which he can be extradited.
The legal problem with viruses, quite simply, is their internationality. They
seep across borders, carried anonymously on diskettes or uploaded via phone
lines to bulletin boards; their provenance is often unknown, their authorship
usually a mystery. But inspector John Austen was determined that the AIDS
diskette incident would be different. He viewed it as the “most serious” case
the unit had faced: not only was it a large-scale attack on computers by a
trojan-horse program, it was blackmail—or something very similar. In this
case, he also had a complaint; indeed, he had a few thousand complaints. It was
clearly time for the unit to throw its resources into tracking down the author
of the trojan.
The publishers of PC Business World told the police that they had sold this
particular mailing list for about $2,000 to a Mr. E. Ketema of Ketema &
Associates, who purported to be an African businessman representing a Nigerian
software company. The transaction had been carried out by post; no one had ever
met Ketema.
Ketema & Associates operated out of a maildrop address in Bond Street, London.
Company documents revealed that the firm had three other directors, supposedly
Nigerian: Kitian Mekonen, Asrat Wakjiri, and Fantu Mekesse. The staff of the
company that operated the maildrop had never seen the three Nigerians, but they
had met Mr. Ketema. Far from being an African businessman, he was described as
white, bearded, and probably American.
Computer Unit detectives then turned their attention to PC Cyborg Corporation
of Panama City. Through inquiries to the Panamanian police, it was discovered
that the company had been registered a year earlier. The Panamanians were also
able to find the company’s local telephone number.
Waiting until early evening in London, when it would be ten A.M. in Panama, a
detective put a call through, and was rewarded by the sound of an American
voice when the phone was answered. “Mr. Ketema?” asked the detective
tentatively. “Who?” answered the voice. It turned out to be an American marine.
Panama had been invaded on that very day.
- Simultaneous inquiries in Nigeria did not turn up evidence of
the three Nigerian businessmen who were registered as directors of the company.
Indeed, the Unit discovered that the three names didn’t sound Nigerian at all.
They might have been made up.
By then the Computer Unit’s detectives were convinced that they were chasing
one man, probably an American.
The arrest happened almost by accident. New Scotland Yard had routinely
circulated details of the case to Interpol, the international police
intelligence agency. Four days before Christmas in 1989, just two weeks after
the diskettes had been posted from London, the Dutch police detained an
American citizen at Schiphol airport in Amsterdam, who had been behaving
strangely.
The American was Joseph Lewis Popp. He was en route from Nairobi, where he had
been attending a WHO seminar, to Ohio, where he lived with his parents in the
small town of Willowick, near Cleveland. Popp seemed to think that someone was
trying to kill him: at Schiphol he had written “Dr. Popp has been poisoned” on
the suitcase of another traveler, apparently in an attempt to notify the
police. When he had calmed down, the authorities took a discreet look through
his bags: in one, they found the company seal for PC Cyborg Corporation.
The police let Popp continue his journey to Ohio, then notified Austen in
England about the seal. On January 18, 1990, Austen began extradition
proceedings. The charge: “That on December 11, 1989, within the jurisdiction of
the Central Criminal Court, you with a view to gain for another, viz. PC Cyborg
Corporation of Panama, with menaces made unwarranted demands, viz. a payment of
one hundred and eighty nine U.S. dollars or three hundred and seventy eight
U.S. dollars from the victim.” In Ohio the FBI began a surveillance of Popp’s
parents’ home, and finally arrested him on February 3rd.
Neighbors in Willowick were said to have been surprised at his arrest. He was
described as “quiet, intelligent, and a real gentleman.” At the time of his
arrest he was thirty-nine, a zoologist and anthropologist who had worked as a
consultant on animal behavior with UNICEF and WHO. He was a soft-spoken man,
darkhaired, with flecks of gray in his beard. He had graduated from Ohio State
University in 1972 and obtained a doctorate in anthropology from Harvard in
1979. In the previous few years he had become passionately interested in AIDS.
Austen’s extradition request ground through the American courts for nearly a
year. In September 1990 Jim Bates was flown over to Cleveland for five days to
give evidence at Popp’s extradition hearing. It is unusual to have live
witnesses at such hearings, but Jim brought the AIDS diskette. He was the
principal witness, and it was his task to demonstrate to the court what the
diskette was and what it did.
In the hallway outside the small courtroom, Jim sat beside Popp’s parents, a
friendly and courteous pair. “Do you like Cleveland?” Popp’s mother asked. Jim
wasn’t sure; all he had seen by then was the airport, a hotel room, and the
hallway. Inside the courtroom Jim had his first glance at Joseph Popp. His hair
was long and unkempt, his beard had grown out, making the ~ray more emphatic.
He shuffled around the courtroom, wearing a shabby jacket, a sweater, and
faded jeans. He looked, Jim later said, “like a lost soul.”
Popp’s mental state was the crux of the defense’s argument in the extradition
hearings: his lawyers argued that he had suffered a nervous breakdown and was
unfit to stand trial. Popp never denied writing the AIDS trojan nor sending out
the diskettes. But at the time, his lawyers said, he was in the grip of mental
illness and was behaving abnormally.
The lawyers also argued that the demand for a license fee for the use of the
diskette was not tantamount to blackmail. It was, they agreed, somewhat extreme
to wreck a computer’s hard disk if the user didn’t pay, but operators were
warned not to load the diskette if they didn’t accept the terms and conditions
laid down in the instruction leaflet. And it was quite clearly stated on the
same sheet that if they used the diskette and didn’t pay, the computer “would
stop functioning normally.”
There was a basis in law to the argument. Software publishers
have long struggled to stop the unauthorized use and copying of their copyright
programs. Software piracy is said to cost American publishers as much as $5
billion a year, and many markets
Taiwan, Thailand, Hong Kong, Singapore, Brazil, India, and even Japan, among
others—have become what are euphemistically referred to as “single-disk”
countries: in other words, countries where one legitimate copy of a software
program is bought and the rest illegally copied. To combat piracy, publishing
houses have used a number of devices: some programs, for example, contain
deliberate “errors,” which are triggered at set intervals—say, once every
year—and which require a call from the user to the publisher to rectify. The
publisher can then verify that the user is legitimate and has paid his license
fee before telling him how to fix it.
Other publishers have resorted to more extreme methods. One celebrated case
involved an American cosmetics conglomerate that had leased a program from a
small software house to handle the distribution of its products. On October 16,
1990, after a disagreement between the two about the lease payments, the software company dialed into the cosmetic giant’s computer and entered a code that
disabled its own program. The cosmetics company’s entire distribution operation
was halted for three days. The software house argued that it was simply
protecting its property and that its action was akin to a disconnection by the
telephone company. The cosmetics company said that it was “commercial
terrorism.”
The Cleveland District Court, however, rejected arguments that the AIDS
diskettes simply contained some sort of elaborate copyright-protection device.
It also ruled that Popp was fit to stand trial and ordered his extradition to
Britain to face charges.
Popp was the first person ever extradited for a computer crime and the first
ever to be tried in Britain for writing a malicious program. From the welter of
complaints, the police had prepared five counts against him; he faced ten years
in prison on each charge. According to
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