A short story of how a computer virus is born.

Around 2:00am one morning a very smart but misguided person sits in the dark with only the light of his computer screen illuminating the room. We will call him Mike... Mike ponders a way to get back at the world for being so cruel to him. He decides to create a nasty little program that will destroy any computer that opens it. He disguises this program inside of a friendly looking email message and sends it on it's way to unsuspecting victims.

A few minutes later the email message is received by various people whom Mike hates. These people open the email and then click on a innocent looking attachment. The virus is unleashed and destroys their computer. BUT before destroying it, the nasty little program takes control of the computer and sends itself in another email message back out to everyone on the innocent victim's email mailing lists.

This process continues for hours throughout the day. Every victim who opens the email proceeds to resend the same email to everyone else on the Internet without even knowing what happened. The message spreads around the world within a few hours.

A computer virus is BORN!

Around 8:00am the same day companies that sell Anti-Virus software are alerted to the fact that a new nasty virus has hit the Internet. They feverishly dissect the virus program and proceed to create a "cure" for it. They cure it by creating another program that will hunt down and delete the virus. It takes hours to dissect and cure the virus. They finally get a handle on the situation at about 5:00pm and have the cure available by 6:00pm. All of the Anti-Virus vendors charge their customers A LOT of money to provide these virus cures.

Now - between the 2:00am creation of the virus and the 6:00pm cure for it - EVERY email system is vulnerable to the virus. EVERYONE who opens the virus will get infected and continue the vicious cycle until the virus is stopped.

The Fulton County School email system gets hit by the latest virus at around 12:00 noon. The first person to open the email message spreads it to everyone else in our system. As more and more people opened the message it began to duplicate itself and some users receive as many as 200 infected messages in their inbox. This huge amount of email clogs up our system and crashes the email servers. We shut down the email system to stop the spread.

At around 7:30pm the same day - the Network Administrator for the Fulton County School System is sitting in the dark with only the light of his computer screen illuminating the room. He is trying to download the virus cure and apply it so email can start working again. The problem is EVERYONE else on the Internet is trying to download the cure at the same time so it takes over an hour to get it. At around 9:30pm the Network Administrator is sleepy, red-eyed, and still trying to get email working again. His bedtime is 9:00pm but at 10:30pm he is still working to try and get email back on-line. He finally has everything working at around 11:00pm and falls asleep face down on his keyboard with the mouse still firmly gripped in his hand... He dreams of strangling Mike all night.

The next morning everyone comes back to work and finds a lot of strange emails in their inbox. They are all a result of the virus infection but the virus has been removed from them by the cure. Technical support people are frantically locking down the email of the 50 or more people who got infected and are planning a procedure to remove the virus from the infected computers.

THE END