He's 21, he's got dreadlocks, likes punk bands... and his hobby could wreck your computer in seconds. Clive Thompson infiltrates the secret world of the virus writers who see their work as art - while others fear that it is cyber-terrorism.
Mario stubs out his cigarette and sits down at the desk in his bedroom. He pops into his laptop the CD of Iron Maiden's Number of the Beast, his latest favourite album. 'I really like it,' he says. 'My girlfriend bought it for me.' He gestures to the 15-year-old girl with straight dark hair lounging on his bed and she throws back a shy smile. Mario, 16, is a secondary-school student in a small town in the foothills of southern Austria. (He didn't want me to use his last name.) His shiny shoulder-length hair covers half his face and his sleepy green eyes, making him look like a very young, languid Mick Jagger. On his wall, he has an enormous poster of Anna Kournikova which, he admits sheepishly, his girlfriend is not thrilled about. Downstairs, his mother is cleaning up after dinner. She isn't thrilled these days, either. But what bothers her isn't Mario's poster. It's his hobby.
When Mario is bored, he likes to sit at his laptop and create computer viruses and worms. Online, he goes by the name Second Part to Hell, and he has written more than 150 examples of what computer experts call 'malware': tiny programs that exist solely to self-replicate, infecting computers hooked up to the internet. Sometimes, these programs cause damage and sometimes they don't. Mario says he prefers to create viruses that don't intentionally wreck data, because simple destruction is too easy. 'Anyone can rewrite a hard drive with one or two lines of code,' he says. 'It makes no sense. It's really lame.' Besides which, it's mean, he says, and he likes to be friendly.
But still - just to see if he could do it - a year ago he created a rather dangerous tool: a program that autogenerates viruses. It's called a Batch Trojan Generator and anyone can download it freely from Mario's website. With a few simple mouse clicks, you can use the tool to create your own malicious 'Trojan horse'. Like its ancient namesake, a Trojan virus arrives in someone's e-mail looking like a gift, a jpeg picture or a video, for example, but actually bearing dangerous cargo.
