The Black Baron
The first person imprisoned in Britain for writing a computer virus
Christopher Pile, an unemployed programmer from Devon writing as the Black Baron, produced the SMEG engine — a polymorphic toolkit that mutated the appearance of code on each infection so that signature-based scanners could not recognise it — and used it in viruses named Pathogen and Queeg.
He distributed them through bulletin boards and released the engine so others could use it too. He was convicted in November 1995 under the Computer Misuse Act 1990 and sentenced to eighteen months' imprisonment.
The first British custodial sentence for virus writing, and the point at which polymorphism made signature matching alone an insufficient defence — a problem the industry has been working around ever since.
The Hacker Chronicles
Volume One — Origins
This page is the summary. The chapter — ‘The Black Baron’ — 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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