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The pace of contagion seems to be escalating. When the Mydoom.A email virus struck in late January, it spread even faster than Sobig.F; at its peak, experts estimated, one out of every five email messages was a copy of Mydoom.A. It also carried a nasty payload: it reprogrammed victim computers to attack the website of SCO, a software firm vilified by geeks in the 'open source' software community.
You might assume that the blame - and the legal repercussions - for the destruction would land directly at the feet of people like Mario. But as the police around the globe have cracked down on cybercrime in the past few years, virus writers have become more cautious, or at least more crafty. These days, many elite writers do not spread their works at all. Instead, they 'publish' them, posting their code on web sites, often with detailed descriptions of how the program works. Essentially, they leave their viruses lying around for anyone to use.
Invariably, someone does. The people who release the viruses are often anonymous mischief-makers, or 'script kiddies'. That's a derisive term for aspiring young hackers, usually teenagers or students, who don't yet have the skill to program computers but like to pretend they do. They download the viruses, claim to have written them themselves and then set them free in an attempt to assume the role of a fearsome digital menace. Script kiddies often have only a dim idea of how the code works and little concern for how a digital plague can rage out of control. Our modern virus epidemic is thus born of a symbiotic relationship between the people smart enough to write a virus and the people dumb enough - or malicious enough - to spread it.