Michelangelo, the cyber threat that made pschitt in the 90s

[Les 5 affaires qui ont marqué la cybersécurité] During the coming weeks, Numerama invites you to come back to five founding events for computer security, through 5 articles. For this third episode, we come back to the history of the Michelangelo malware.

About 5 million computers threatened, that is to say, at the time, an impressive number of machines. At the beginning of March 1992, the Michelangelo malware threat made the headlines of the general press around the world, as for example here in the columns of the Los Angeles Times.

This is one of the first times, three years after the Datacrime virus, that there has been any real concern in the media about the risks posed by a computer virus. ” Its appearance marks the end of an era, underlines in a book the researcher in cybercrime François Paget. Until now, viruses had often remained discreet and confined to a world of specialists. “

In this year of grunge, computers are still massive central units with 3.5-inch floppy disk drives. This is precisely the entry point for Michelangelo, which targets DOS systems, that rudimentary command line operating system that predated current graphical interfaces. As this American Cert report reminds us, the computer virus is spread using simple floppy disks. At the time, it was almost the only way to transmit data.

Infected floppy disks

If you are over 30, you must have forgotten to remove a floppy disk from the drive. Which blocked the start. It was then necessary to remove it and make a reset. This is why the design of Michelangelo, a variant of the Stoned virus, was quite clever. By starting a computer with an infected floppy disk inserted in the drive, the user unwittingly spread the virus, which was written to the hard drive. Once installed, Michelangelo – it is not known who wrote his lines of code – copied itself to all the floppy disks the user accessed. And so on.

This is the only thing the computer virus was doing. Until March 6, 1992. That day, the virus really activated and overwrote the first sectors of the hard drive, making them inaccessible. It sort of destroyed all of your data. The date being the birthday of Renaissance artist Michelangelo, Australian virus expert Roger Riodan, the first to discover the virus in February 1991, decided to name this program Michelangelo.

“The computer world survived”

But on Saturday March 7, 1992, we have to face the facts. The announced disaster did not take place and the virus, from a black plague, is relegated to the rank of cold. ” Michelangelo’s 517th birthday has taken place and the computer world has survived The Washington Post ironically remarked. If there were some victims, the computer scientists explained the low damage by the important media coverage of the virus and its relative dissemination.

The episode puts antivirus makers on the spot. They are accused of playing on fear to sell their product. Marked for his role in the dramatization of the incident, John McAfee, then one of the main publishers of software of this type, is discarded on the journalists. ” I always said that the estimates [de machines infectées] ranged from 50,000 to 5 million McAfee explained. In fine, the antivirus rush will do the business of the controversial computer scientist. He resold his shares in his firm in 1994, the start of his fortune. Thanks Michelangelo.

Bitcoin and hacker in pajamas, the first part of our series “The 5 cases that marked cybersecurity” is devoted to the history of Cryptolocker, the first modern ransomware. The second part has corrupted software that the Americans voluntarily passed on to the Soviets during the Cold War.