Computer viruses of the Black Baron

It has been a long time since golden era of hacking ended – meaning, in 70s and 80s, were times, with much less awareness of computer security overall. At the same time, programmers were much more skilled and theoretically grounded than they are today.. and one of them was The Black Baron.

Imagine living in 80s as a software engineer – you are super smart, and computer systems are very easy to hack. What will you do? Yes.. Many poor souls decided to break in various systems, websites, etc. mostly for fun or malicious purposes. And yes, many of these poor souls ended up in jail too! So please don’t do anything illegal! Sadly, the law applies to programmers too. This is also story of The Black Baron – computer virus writer.

Who is The Black Baron?

Christopher Pile, born in 1969, southern England, was at the times young, self-taught british programmer. According to The Independent – British newspaper journalist group, Chris always had feeling, he was never accepted by computer engineering professional community because having no formal education.

Nevertheless he managed to have professional experience and worked in several tech companies. In his free time, Chris was interested in studying computer architecture, operational systems as well as programming itself. He created infamous and few of the most sophisticated computer viruses at the time – Pathogen and Queeg (As you can see, viruses names were inspired by Red Dwarf TV series).

Following years, Christopher’s viruses created damage to various world-wide famous companies.

The unexpected move

You may wonder how it worked… just saying somebody created computer virus basically means following: “Somebody created a computer program, which does a bad things”. So let’s take a look under the hood.

Chris – The Black Baron created software called Smeg. This could be attached to any computer program. What Smeg causes, is, that it recreates new variation of a program’s code. The newly recreated program is the same when it comes to functionality, but not the structure. Thats it..

Now you may wonder how it can be dangerous in any way or at least interesting. Imagine this scenario – You bought antivirus for your computer, so your computer stays safe. An antivirus company however, must have virus present, so they know how virus looks, and how it behaves. After you know the virus, you can make your antivirus to detect it easily.

But with Black Baron’s Smeg, things get much more trickier. Imagine virus completely changes itself after every new infection. In order to detect and stop this kind of viruses, you would have a hard time.

The mad scientist’s deed

What Chris done was not only creating viruses on his own, but rather, encouraged other virus creators to use Smeg in order to make their viruses more dangerous and difficult to spot. As result, he indirectly released a wave of computer viruses, which were very difficult to stop.

Microprose – One of the most famous computer game creator (Sid Meier is the founder) lost around 500 000£ as direct consequence of Smeg based virus infection. Other companies, like Apricot had temporarily shut down their machines because of virus activity.

Black Baron created directly and indirectly great havoc. He draw attention of both, American and British news. International cyber crime police investigated these activities, and eventually, found out Black Baron is Chris. Soon he got charged, detained and eventually sentenced for 18 months in prison for cyber criminality and inciting others to spread malicious software.

Seems like a big deal, isn’t it? And here is the kicker – Chris was at the time of prosecution only 26 years old! After having his 15 minutes of fame and prison-regret, industry could not ignore his talent and profound technical skills. Eventually he ended up working as a video game software engineer for various consoles (Nintendo, ZX Spectre, etc.).

Chris was very smart. All the way. But ending up in prison is not the best thing you can use your smartness for. Always be responsible. If you know anything interesting about The Black Baron, let us know on PixelCarp Facebook page.