textfiles/virus/locprst.txt

[An excerpt from THE VIRUS CREATION LABS: A JOURNEY
INTO THE UNDERGROUND]

A PRIEST DEPLOYS HIS SATANIC MINIONS

Everyone knows the best virus writers hang out on
secret bulletin board systems, the bedroom bohemias
of the computer underground, right?  Wrong.  In
mid-1992, a 16-year-old hacker from San Diego who called
himself Little Loc signed on to the Prodigy on-line service
for his virus information needs.  The experience was
not quite what he expected.

Prodigy had a reputation in 1992 as the on-line service
for middle-class Americans who could stand mind-roasting
amounts of retail advertising on their computer screens as
long as they had relatively free access to an almost
infinite number of public electronic mail forums devoted
to callers' hobbies.  Since Prodigy's pricing scheme was
ridiculously cheap per hour, it was quite seductive for
callers to spend an hour or two a night sifting through
endless strings of messages just to engage in a little
cyberspace chit-chat.

Into this living-room atmosphere stepped Little Loc, logged
on as James Gentile, looking for anyone to talk with about
computer viruses, particularly
his idea of properly written computer viruses.  Little
Loc, you see, had written a mutating virus which infected
most of the programs on a system dangerously quickly.
If you were using anti-virus software that didn't properly
recognize the virus - and at the time it was written none
did - the very process of looking for it on
a machine would spread it to every possible program on
a computer's hard disk. While many viruses were trivial
toys, Satan Bug, which is what Little Loc called his
program, was sophisticated enough to pose a real hazard.
The trouble was, Little Loc was dying to tell people
about Satan Bug. But he had no one to talk to who would
understand.  That's where Prodigy came in.
Prodigy, thought Little Loc, must have some hacker
discussions, even if they were feeble, centered on viruses.
It was a quaintly naive assumption.

The Satan Bug was named after a Seventies telemovie starring
George Maharis, Anne Francis and a sinister Richard
Basehart in a race to find a planet-sterilizing super
virus stolen from a U.S. bio-warfare lab.
Little Loc had never actually seen the movie, but he'd
run across the name in a copy of TV Guide
and it sounded cool, so he used it for his digital
creation. Satan Bug was the second virus he had electronically
published.  The first was named Fruitfly but it was a
slow, tame infector so the hacker didn't push it.

A bigger inspiration for Satan Bug was the work of the
Dark Avenger, the shadowy Bulgarian virus programmer whom
anti-virus software p.r. men and others had elevated to
the stature of world's greatest virus writer.  Little Loc was fascinated
by the viruses attributed to Dark Avenger.  The Dark Avenger
obviously knew how real computer viruses should be written,
thought Little Loc. None of his programs were like the silly
crap that composed most of the files stocked by the
computer underground.  For example, his Eddie virus - also
known as Dark Avenger - had gained a reputation as a program to
be reckoned with.  It pushed fast infection to a fine art,
using the very process anti-virus programs used to examine
files as an opportunity to corrupt them with its presence.
If someone suspected they had a virus, scanned for it and
Eddie was in memory but not detected, the anti-virus
software would be subverted, spreading Eddie to every
program on the disk in one sweep. Eddie would also
mangle a part of the machine's command shell when it jumped
into memory from an infected program.
When this happened, the command processor would reload
itself from the hard disk and promptly be infected, too.
This put the Eddie virus in total charge of the machine.
From that point on, every sixteen infections, the virus
would take a pot shot at a sector of the hard disk,
obliterating a small piece of data.  If the data were
part of a never-used program, it could go unnoticed.
So as long as the Eddie virus was in command, the
user stood a good chance of having to deal with a slow,
creeping corruption of his programs and data.

Little Loc was a good student of the Dark Avenger's
programming and although he was completely self-taught,
he had more native ability than all of the other virus
programmers in the phalcon/SKISM and NuKE hacking groups.
"[Virus writing] was something to do besides blasting furballs
in Wing Commander," he said blithely when asked about
the origins of his career as a virtuoso virus writer.

Accordingly, the Satan Bug was just as fast an infector as
Eddie and it, too, would immediately go after
the command shell when launched into memory from
an infected program.  But Satan Bug was very
cleverly encrypted, whereas Eddie was not,
and it extended these encryption tricks so that it
was cloaked in computer memory, a feature somewhat
unusual in computer viruses but popularized by another
program called The Whale which intrigued Little Loc.

The Whale was a German virus which - theoretically -
was the most complex of all computer viruses.  It
was packed with code which was supposed to make it
stealthy -- invisible to certain anti-virus software
techniques.  It was armored with anti-debugging code
and devilishly encrypted, designed purely to
flummox anti-virus software developers trying to examine it.
They would often mention it as an example of a super
stealth virus to mystified science and technology
writers looking for good copy. In practice, The
Whale was what one might call anti-stealth.
Although it was all the things mentioned and more,
when run on any machine, The Whale's processes
were so cumbersome the computer would be forced to
slow to a crawl. Indeed, it was a clever fellow who could
get The Whale to consent to infect even one program.

The Whale appeared to be purely an intellectual
challenge for programmers.  It was intended to mesmerize
anti-virus software developers and suck them into
spending hours analyzing it. Little Loc, too, was
drawn to it.  He pored over the German
language disassembly of The Whale's source code.
The hacker even made a version that wasn't encrypted,
pulling out the code which The Whale used to generate
its score of mutant variations. It didn't help. The
Whale, even when disassembled, was loathe to let go of
its secrets and remained a slow, obstinately
uninfective puzzle.

Have you gotten the idea that Prodigy callers might
not be the perfect choice as an audience to
appreciate Little Loc's Satan Bug?

Nevertheless, Little Loc landed on Prodigy with a thud.
He described the Satan Bug and invited anyone who
was interested to pick up a copy of its source code at
a bulletin board system where he'd stashed it.  Immediately,
the hacker got into a rhubarb with a Prodigy member named
Henri Delger.  Delger was, for want of a better description,
the Prodigy network's unpaid computer virus help desk
manager.  Every night, Delger would log on and look for
the messages of users who had questions about computer
viruses.  If they just wanted general information, Delger
would supply it.  If they had some kind of computer glitch
which they thought might be a virus, Delger would hold their
hand until they calmed down, and then tell them what to
do.  And, for the few who had computer virus infections,
Delger would try to identify the virus and recommend
software, usually McAfee Associates' SCAN, which would
remedy the problem.

Little Loc was annoyed by Delger, whom he thought was merely
a shill for McAfee Associates.  Since Delger
answered so many questions on Prodigy, he had a set of
canned answers which he would employ to make the workload
lighter.  The canned answers tended to antagonize Little Loc
and other younger callers who fancied themselves hackers, too.
Prodigy's liberal demo account policy allowed some of
these young callers to get access to the network under
assumed names like "Orion Rogue." This allowed them to be
rude and truculent, at least for a few days, to paying
Prodigy customers. These techno-popinjays, of course,
immediately sided with Little Loc, which didn't do much for
the virus programmer's credibility.

There was often quite a bit of talk about viruses and Delger
would supply much of the information, typing up brief
summaries of virus effects embroidered with his own
experiences analyzing viruses. "You're not a
programmer!" Little Loc would storm at Delger.
If you weren't a programmer, you couldn't understand viruses,
insisted the author of Satan Bug. Little Loc would correct
minor technical errors Delger made when describing the
programs. In retaliation, Delger would calmly point out the
spelling mistakes made by Little Loc and his
colleagues. It was quite a flame war.  On one side
was Little Loc, who gamely tried to get callers to appreciate
the technical qualities of some viruses.  On the other side
was a bunch of middle-aged computer hobbyists who were convinced
all virus writers were illiterate teenage nincompoops in
need of serious jail time, or perhaps a sound beating.

The debates drew a big audience, including another hacker
named Brian Oblivion, whose Waco, Texas, bulletin board,
Caustic Contagion, would provide a brief haven for Satan
Bug's author.  Little Loc, however, soon found other
places that would accept his virus source code. Kim
Clancy's famous Department of the Treasury Security
Branch system was among them.  Little Loc logged on and proffered
Satan Bug.  The Hell Pit - a huge virus exchange in
a suburb of Chicago - had its phone number posted on Prodigy,
as was that of one called Dark Coffin, a system in eastern
Pennsylvania.  Dutifully, Little Loc couriered his virus to
these systems, too.

Satan Bug was a difficult virus to detect.  Although in
a pinch you could find Satan Bug because of a trick
change it made to an infected program's date/time stamp,
for all intents and purposes Satan Bug was transparent
to anti-virus scanners. And this window of opportunity
stayed open for a surprising amount of time despite
the fact that Little Loc had supplied the Satan Bug to
all the public virus exchanges patrolled by anti-virus
moles.

Little Loc stood apart from other virus
programmers who seemed to have little
interest in whether their creations made it into
the public's computers.  The real travel of his
virus around the world would grant him recognition
like that of the Dark Avenger, he thought. So, he
wanted people to take Satan Bug and infect
the software of others, period.
Months later, after the virus had struck down the Secret
Service network clear across the continent, I asked
Little Loc how it might have gotten into the wild
in large enough numbers so that it eventually found
its way into such a supposedly secure system.

"I'll tell you this once and only once: Satan Bug had help!"
he said, simply.

After his Prodigy debut and before Satan Bug hit the
Secret Service, Little Loc was recruited by the virus-writing
group phalcon/SKISM, changing his handle in the
process to Priest.  Joining phalcon/SKISM didn't necessarily
mean you were going to virus writing conventions in cyberspace
with other members of the group, but it was a badge of
status signifying to others in the computer underground who
required such things that you had arrived, as a virus writer
anyway.

Since Priest lived on the West Coast, however, and the brain
trust of phalcon/SKISM was located in the metro-NYC area,
there was little concrete collaboration between the two,
especially after Priest racked up a $600 telephone bill
calling bulletin boards.  Since Priest didn't hack free
phone service, his family had to pay the bill, which effectively
cut down on much of his long distance telephone contact
bulletin board systems like Caustic Contagion in Waco, Texas.

Caustic Contagion, for a short period of time, was one of the
better known virus exchange bulletin board systems.  Its
sysop, Brian Oblivion, had an extremely liberal policy with
regards to virus access and carried a large number of
Internet/Usenet newsgroups which gave callers a semblance
of access to the Internet. Caustic Contagion's other
specialty, besides viruses, was Star Trek newsgroups and
for some reason which completely eludes me, the BBS's
callers found the convergence of computer viruses and
Star Trek debate extremely congenial.

Priest and another phalcon/SKISM virus writer named
Memory Lapse would hang out on Caustic Contagion.
Quite naturally, Oblivion's bulletin board was
one of the first places to receive the
programmers' newest creations, often
before they were published in phalcon/SKISM's electronic
publication, 40Hex magazine.

Priest's next virus was Payback and it was written to punish
the mainstream computing community for the arrest
of Apache Warrior, the "president" of ARCV, a rather
harmless but vocal English virus-writing group which had
been undone when Alan Solomon, an anti-virus software
developer, was able to convince New Scotland Yard's
computer crime unit to seize the hacking group's equipment
and software in a series of surprise raids. Priest's Payback
virus would format the hard disk in memory of this event.
Payback gathered little attention in the underground, mostly
because few people knew much about ARCV and Apache
Warrior in the first place.

Another of Priest's interests was the set of
anti-virus programs issued by the Dutch company,
Thunderbyte.  The product of a virus researcher
named Frans Veldman, the Thunderbyte programs were
regarded by most virus writers as the anti-virus
programs of choice.  They were sophisticated,
technically sweet and put to shame similar software
marketed by McAfee Associates, Central Point Software,
and Symantec, which manufactured the Norton Anti-virus.

One of Frans Veldman's programs, called TBClean,
was of particular interest to Priest and others
because it claimed to be able to remove
completely unknown viruses from infected files.
How it did this was a neat trick.  Essentially,
TBClean would execute the virus-infected file
in a controlled environment and try to take
advantage of the fact that the virus always had
to reassemble in memory an uncontaminated copy
of the infected program to make it work
properly.  TBClean would intercept this action
and write the program back to the hard disk sans
virus.  Priest and virus writer Rock Steady, the
leader of the NuKE virus-writing group,
had also noticed the phenomenon. Both tried writing
viruses that would subvert the process and turn
TBClean upon itself.

Priest wrote Jackal, a virus which - under the proper
conditions - would sense TBClean trying to execute
it, step outside the Thunderbyte software's controls
and format the hard disk.  In theory, this made Priest's
virus the worst kind of retaliating program, with the
potential to destructively strip unsuspecting users'
hard disks of their data when they tried to disinfect
their machines. (It couldn't happen if you just
manually erased the Jackal-virus-infected program,
but many people who use computers
as part of everyday work simply want the option of having
the software remove viruses. They don't want to
have to worry about the technicalities
of retaliating viruses designed to smash their data
if they have the temerity to use anti-virus software.)

Of course, Jackal's development was deemed
a great propaganda victory by the North
American virus underground.  Rock Steady nonsensically
insisted Frans Veldman's programs were dangerous
software because TBClean could be made to augment a
virus infection instead of remove it.

Brian Oblivion immediately tried Jackal out.  It didn't
work, he said, but only caused TBClean to hang up
his machine.  This was because Jackal was version
specific, explained Priest.  It would only work on certain
editions of the program.  In reality, this meant that
Jackal's retaliating capability posed little threat
to typical computer users, who had never heard of
the virus-programmer's favorite software, Thunderbyte,
much less TBClean. Nevertheless, Priest continued to
write the TBClean subverting trick into his viruses,
including it in Natas (that's Satan spelled backwards),
which eventually got loose in Mexico City in the spring
of 1994.

All the routines to format a computer's hard disk and to
slowly corrupt data ala the Eddie virus, which
Priest had designed his Predator virus to do, made
it clear the hacker cared little for any of the finer
arguments over the value of computer viruses which were
entertained from time to time by denizens of the underground
as well as academics.  Viruses were for getting your name
around, infecting files and destroying data, according
to Priest.  He just laughed when the topic of ethical
or productive uses of computer viruses -- such as the study
of artificial life -- came up.

In any case, by the fall of 1993, after Priest had
retired from the Prodigy scene, Satan Bug was
generating its own kind of media-fueled panic.

On the Compuserve network, hysterical government
employees were posting nonsensical alarums
about the virus in the McAfee Associates
virus information special interest group.

"Satan's Bug" was part of a foreign power's attempt
to sabotage government computers!  It was encrypted
in nine different ways and was "eating" your data!
A State Department alarm had started!

Wherever the information about "Satan's Bug" was
coming from, it was 100 percent phlogiston. Satan Bug was hardly
aimed at government computer systems. It did not "eat" anything
and although difficult for many anti-virus programs to scan, the
virus could be found on infected systems by making good use
of software designed to take a snapshot of the vital statistics
of computer files and sound an alarm when these changed, which
always happened when Satan Bug added itself to programs.

Even more amusing was the suspicion that Satan Bug had been
inserted on government computers by some undisclosed foreign
country, from whence it originated.  I suppose, however,
some people might consider Southern California a foreign country.

Priest enjoyed reading these kinds of things.  His virus was
famous, an obvious source of confusion and hysteria.

About the same time, the Secret Service's computer network
in Washington, D.C., was infected by the virus, which knocked
the infected machines off-line for approximately three
days.  News about the event was tough to keep secret among
government employees and it leaked.  The Crypt Newsletter
published a short news piece in its September 1993 issue
on the event and reported that the infection had
been cleaned up by David Stang, formerly of the National
Computer Security Association, but now providing anti-virus
and security guidance for Norman Data Defense Systems in
Fairfax, northern Virginia.

Jack Lewis, head of the Secret Service's computer crime
unit, and two other agents flew out to interrogate
Priest in his San Diego home in October of 1993.

Lewis and the other agents gave Priest the third degree.
They shook a printed-out copy of The Crypt Newsletter
containing the Satan Bug story in his face and did
everything in their power to make Priest think he ought
to cease and desist writing computer viruses forthwith.

"About the Secret Service, they weren't too happy about
[Satan Bug], and saw fit to pay me a little visit," recalled
Priest ruefully.

The agents wanted to know everything about Priest - his Social
Security number, where he'd travelled, even who the 16-year-old
worked for.  But Priest didn't work for anyone.

"I'm not quite sure they believed me," he said.
"Apparently, they thought I worked for some anti-virus
company or something to write viruses.  Plus, they wanted
the sources for them."

The Secret Service men wanted to know, straight from the
horse's mouth, what Satan Bug did. "They said some victims were
worried their systems weren't completely clean because they
thought it might infect data files," Priest continued. "I told
them it wouldn't.  They also wanted my opinion on things which
surprised me, like different anti-virus programs and encryption
algorithms, including Clipper. I didn't ask why.

"Jack Lewis also said someone claimed I said 'All government
computers will be infected by December' or some such rubbish.
Apparently, they thought I wrote Satan Bug as a weapon against
the government or whatever, I can't be too sure . . ."

Priest told them no, Satan Bug wasn't specifically aimed at
government computers, but it was hard to tell if the
agents believed him. They were trained to reveal little,
and to be unnerving to those interviewed.

"They just stared," Priest said, "as they did in response to
every question I asked, including 'what's your name?'
I tried - really tried - to act cool, but my heart was pounding
like a hummingbird's."

The agents were keenly interested in Priest's other
handles, all the viruses he had written, which, if any,
computer systems he might have spread them on, the
names of some phalcon/SKISM members and the structure
of the virus-writing group and details of their
hacking exploits.

Priest declined to say anything about the identities of members
of phalcon/SKISM. "I told them I knew nothing of the
hackers and phreakers, and little more than you could pick up
from reading an issue of 40Hex."

Priest was more interested in other secretive agencies
within the government.  He cultivated an interest in
stories about deep black intelligence agencies.  Perhaps
he envisioned himself writing destructive viruses as part
of a covert weapons project for one of them.

"Aren't there any other agencies which would be more
interested in what I'm doing?" Priest asked the agents.
He didn't get an answer.

Eventually, the Secret Servicemen went away
with a Priest-autographed printout of the source code
to Satan Bug.

Programming Satan Bug had turned out to be richly rewarding
for Priest.  Not only had it gotten him recognized immediately
in the computer underground, it had made him feared in the
trenches of corporate America to the point where the Secret
Service had felt compelled to intervene.

Since the Satan Bug panic was a golden opportunity for anti-virus
vendors to once again market wares, the stories in the
computing press kept coming.  LAN Times put the virus on
the front page of its November 1 issue with the headline,
"Be on the Lookout for the Diabolical 'Satan Bug' Virus."
LAN Times East Coast bureau chief Laura Didio
wrote "the Satan Bug is designed
to circumvent the security facilities in Novell Inc.
Netware's NETX program, thereby allowing it to spread
across networks."  While Satan Bug may have certainly
spread across networks, it had nothing to do with the
virus's design. It seemed no matter the truth about
Satan Bug, the story just got more pumped up with
phlogiston and air as it rolled along.

"What's NETX?" asked Priest when he heard about the
LAN Times article.

Of course, the LAN Times article accurately served as
an advertisement for the Satan Bug-detecting software
of Norman Data Defense Systems and McAfee Associates.

Priest, meanwhile, continued to work on viruses.
He had just completed Natas, which he'd turned over
to the Secret Service and to phalcon/SKISM for publication
in an issue of 40Hex.  He also uploaded the virus to
a couple of bulletin board systems in Southern
California. And he finished a very small,
96-byte .COM program-infecting virus.
And there were other things he was working on, he said.

The most interesting fallout from the Secret Service visit was
a job offer from David Stang at Norman Data Defense
Systems, said Priest.  Stang wanted the virus programmer
to come to work for him, starting in the summer of 1994,
after the hacker finished high school.

Priest said Stang was interested in his opinion
about the use of virus code in anti-virus software.
Such code wasn't copyrighted, so it was fair game.
Priest thought this was a bad idea.  Too much virus
code, in his opinion, was crappy anyway, so why would
anyone want to use it?  But Priest said he would think
about the job offer.

By May 1994, Priest's Natas virus had cropped up
in Mexico City, where, according to one anti-virus software
developer, it had been spread by a consultant providing
anti-virus software services.  Through ignorance and
incompetence, the consultant had gotten Natas attached
to a copy of the anti-virus software he was using.
However, like most of Priest's viruses, Natas was a bit
more than most software could handle.  The software detected
Natas in programs but not in an area of the hard disk known
as the master boot record, where the virus also
hid itself.  The result was tragicomic.  The consultant
would search computers for viruses.  The software would find
Natas!  Golly, the consultant would think,  "Natas is here!
I better check other computers, too."  And so, the
consultant would take his Natas-infected software to
other computers where, quite naturally, it would also
detect Natas as it spread the virus to the master boot
record, a part of the computer where the software could
not detect Priest's program.

Natas had come to Mexico from Southern California.  The
consultant often frequented a virus exchange bulletin
board system in Santa Clarita which not only stocked Natas,
but also the issue of 40Hex that contained its source
code.  He had downloaded the virus, perhaps not fully
understood what he was dealing with, and a month or so
later uploaded a desperate plea for help with Priest's
out-of-control program. You could tell from the date
on the electronic cry for help -- May 1994 -- when Natas
began being a real problem in Mexico.

Natas was another typical tricky Priest program.  When in computer
memory, it masked itself in infected programs and made them
appear uninfected.  It would also retrieve a copy
of the uninfected master boot record it carried encrypted in
its body and fake out the user by showing it to him if he tried
to go looking for it there.  Natas also infected diskettes
and spread quickly to programs when they were viewed,
copied or looked at by anti-virus software. It was fair to
say that computer services providers wielding anti-virus
software in a casual manner ought
not to have been allowed anywhere near Natas.

Back in San Diego, Priest was still being interviewed on the
telephone by David Stang and other associates at Norman
Data Defense Systems.  They were concerned that Priest
might leak proprietary secrets to competitors after hiring,
so it was a must that he be absolutely sure of the
seriousness of his potential employment.

By the end of the interview, Priest thought he didn't have
much of a chance at the job, but by July he'd accepted
an offer and moved to Fairfax to begin working for
David Stang.  This was the same David Stang who had written
in the July 1992 issue of his Virus News and Review magazine,
"In this office, we try to see things in terms of black
and white, rather than gray . . . The problem is that
good guys don't wear white hats.  Among virus researchers
are a large number of seemingly gray individuals . . .
This grayness is clear to users. Last week, I asked my
class if anyone in the room trusted anti-virus vendors.
Not one would raise their hand . . . "

But what was Priest working on at Norman Data Defense
Systems?

"A cure for Natas," he laughed softly one afternoon in
late July, 1994, in the Norman Data office. Looking
over the virus once more, Priest
sardonically concluded that his disinfector made it clear the
hacker had made Natas a little too easy to remove from
infected systems. Norman Data Defense had clients in Mexico
and at the Secret Service.

You had to admire the moxie of the young American
virus programmer. He'd set out in 1992 to emulate the
world's greatest virus programmer, Dark Avenger, and
ended up being paid cash money to cure the paintpots
of computer poison he'd created. As for that poor stone
fool, the legendary Dark Avenger, he never even got
a handful of chewing gum for his viruses, having the
misfortune to have been born in the wrong place, Bulgaria,
at the wrong time, during the fall of Communism.

But by the end of the summer, the blush was off the rose
for Priest and Norman Data, too.  Another manager in the
office, Sylvia Moon, didn't like the idea of the hacker
working for the company, Priest said.  And when management
representatives arrived from the parent corporation
in Norway on an inspection tour and were appraised of
Priest's status at a meeting, the hacker heard, they were
not pleasantly surprised to learn there was a virus writer
on the staff.  Officially, said Priest, there was no
reaction, but in reality, the hacker felt, the atmosphere
was deeply strained.  Nevertheless, said Priest,
David Stang maintained that he would protect the hacker's
position.  And Jack Lewis, said Priest, had contacted
the company to set up a luncheon date with the hacker
to discuss more technical issues.  However, Priest
said, David Stang wanted Lewis to provide a Secret Service
statement to the effect that the hiring of the hacker
wasn't such a bad idea.  The luncheon fell through.
The Secret Service would provide no such statement
because, said Priest, it might be construed as a
conflict of interest.  Unknown to him at the
time, the agency had also started spying on
his comings-and-goings in Fairfax.

It all came to an end when one of Priest's acquaintances
from the BBSes called the Norman Data office and left a
message for "James Priest."  Priest was immediately
let go.  David Stang, said Priest, told him the call was
an indication that the hacker couldn't be trusted, that
he was still in touch with the underground.

Paranoia and recriminations flew.  There had been an intern
from William & Mary working at the company whose father
was a Pentagon official, said Priest.  The rumor was that
Priest had been pumping the intern for information on
how to penetrate Pentagon computers and siphoning it back
into the underground.  It was nonsense, said the hacker,
but it became the official version of events.  These
were pretexts, thought Priest.  The real reason he had to
be shown the door, he said, was pressure from the higher-ups
in Norway.  They had been presented with him as a done-deal
hire and it hadn't set well, he said. David Stang, said
Priest, needed a reason to cut him loose and the phone call
from the friend had been the peg to hang it on.  Priest
was a hot potato and he had to go.

Back in San Diego once again, Priest almost sounded relieved.
He had a Sylvia Moon-autographed copy of a computer book
as a memento from the company and that was it.  However,
he had finally been able to videotape "The Satan Bug"
telemovie.  He shifted the VCR into replay and turned
to look at his computer while it was playing.  But the
hacker said he still didn't know what the movie was about
when it was over.  He had been too busy at the PC to
pay attention.  Working . . .

[Footnote:  All the Secret Service's contact with Priest
and his viruses and source code appears, in retrospect,
to not have been much of a learning exercise.  The organization
recently awarded a large contract to Symantec, the makers 
of the Norton Anti-virus, to provide insurance against
computer virus attack.  The Norton Anti-virus has long
been considered one of the worst choices imaginable
for this type of service.]

copyright 1994 American Eagle Publications