The AIDS Trojan
Twenty thousand floppy disks, posted by mail — the first ransomware
Joseph Popp, a Harvard-trained biologist, posted around 20,000 floppy disks labelled 'AIDS Information — Introductory Diskettes' to attendees of a World Health Organization AIDS conference and to subscribers of a medical mailing list.
The disks contained a questionnaire. They also contained code that counted boot cycles and, after ninety restarts, encrypted filenames on the hard drive and displayed a demand for $189 to be sent to a post office box in Panama. The encryption was symmetric and was broken quickly, but a great deal of research data was lost by people who reformatted their disks in panic.
The first ransomware, twenty-five years before the term existed — and it already had the full model: mass distribution, a delay before detonation, and payment to an anonymised drop.
The Hacker Chronicles
Volume One — Origins
This page is the summary. The chapter — ‘The Doctor's Disks’ — follows the case properly: what was known at the time, who decided what, and how it actually unfolded rather than how it was later retold.
Two more volumes this year.
Going Geopolitical in October, Going Strategic in December.
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