Sydney Morning Herald, May 6, 1997


At 21, Clinton Haines never had the chance to grow out of an
obsession with computer viruses which have wreaked havoc at the Tax
Office and Telstra. 


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by JULIE ROBOTHAM

THE FIRST time he met Clint Haines, Rod Fewster was surprised by his height, his bulk and his aura of physical health.

Haines, then 15, had been described by his teacher to Fewster as a "little bastard", and he had formed the impression of a pale, skinny, Artful Dodger type.

That would have been more in keeping with the stereotypical image of a teenage computer hacker - an embittered, antisocial kid sequestered in a stuffy room with a pile of computer equipment no-one else could understand.

But Haines, the creator of some of the world's most notorious computer viruses, was a contradiction in many ways. From a privileged background in Brisbane's better suburbs, he was acknowledged to be exceptionally bright. He had a sense of humour, which set him apart in a largely adolescent community that takes itself very seriously. He was even sporty - he played rugby and his father is a tennis coach.

It's a connection that becomes apparent in his paean to drug-taking, described in an Internet newsgroup:

"Nitrousing out in this state of mind can be wicked ... one can see, perceive, visualise everything that goes on in the particular mental environment you construct ... the passage of a tennis ball under the influence of gravity or the evolution of an argument and the interplay of multiple factors."

Haines died two weeks ago, aged 21, in the smart Brisbane suburb of St Lucia. His friends believe he took a much purer mix of heroin than is generally available.

His death was "a loss to the world", says Fewster, the director of the Brisbane company, Thunderbyte, which specialises in cleaning up computers polluted by computer viruses - ingenious rogue strings of computer code that reproduce in the machine's innards, to the detriment of its legitimate contents.

Fewster is convinced that Haines, whose virus-writing aliases included Harry McBungus, Terminator-Z and TaLoN, went straight two years ago. Since then he had not released a virus "in the wild", which could damage other people's property, though his fascination with them continued; he still wrote new viruses as a challenge to himself and had shown Fewster his work in progress - "he was working on one that was quite revolutionary".

Haines was also working hard at his undergraduate science studies at the University of Queensland, where he was concentrating on the human equivalent of his computer bugs - microbiology. He could have had a shining career ahead of him.

Paradoxically, Fewster was not able to give Haines the help he most needed: when he asked for a job at Thunderbyte, Fewster was obliged to say, "no", because of the need to keep his firm "squeaky clean" and free from the taint of the virus subculture.

"From an ethical point of view I couldn't afford to employ him. But he was conscientiously trying to divorce himself from the virus scene. "Haines had been a bright star in the computer underground, according to George Smith, who has written a book, The Virus Creation Labs, on the subject and also edits a Net newsletter, Crypt (www.soci.niu.edu/~crypt).

"The virus writers who seemed to be most influenced by him were a group called VLAD, some members of whom were also from Brisbane," says Smith. "One named Qark, in particular, indicated he had been inspired to do the virus-writing thing by Haines. This appeared to be a result of the notoriety Haines accumulated."

The day after Haines's death, VLAD released a new virus - RIP Terminator-Z - in memoriam. Still, his sphere of influence was limited, says Smith, because the teenage computer underground is tiny compared with other youth cultures: "While there may be many people with the will or desire to write viruses, the great majority of them are just time-wasters and trivial pests. Individuals like Clint Haines are much smaller in number. North America might not even have half a dozen. Australia would be about the same."

Haines's creations - NoFrills and its derivatives Dudley and 483 - have brought down computers at the Australian Taxation Office, Telstra and Suncorp, and wreaked much more havoc overseas.

Unlike those written by Haines, most viruses have a fatal flaw which stops them being spread or activating effectively.

Jack Kenyon, the managing director of another Brisbane anti-virus company, Leprechaun Software, believes most virus writers secretly yearn for a career in computers. There's inevitably a grey area, he says; some teenagers dabble in the virus culture simply for a better comprehension of programming techniques.

But the more typical virus writer is, "pretty immature - a lot are pretty young, and they're full of themselves".

"They think they're bloody good and I guess a lot of them are quite good," Kenyon says. They rarely reveal themselves face to face, but pursue in cyberspace their love-hate relationship with the people who try to kill their creations. Generally this is not the regular, public parts of the Internet, which the virus writers scorn, but ephemeral private places called bulletin board systems (BBSs), the temporary address of which is passed around by word-of-mouth, like the rave party scene.

In public discussion areas, such as alt.comp.virus on the Internet, the chat is usually low-level and immature, with the occasional frisson when a virus creator deigns to pay a visit. Last week there was a message from a US schoolgirl who wanted to have a virus sent to her stepfather, to punish him for stealing her computer equipment. A boy asked for help on, "how to bypass telnet when it asks for a login and password 'cause I want to change people's schedule 'cause I hate some people and want to put them in special ed." And another young male offers to, "send you over 300 WORKING passwords if you send me either: adult check ID; adult pass; or anyother age verification password".

There was also an illustration of the kinds of things on which virus writers expend their considerable programming skills in order to achieve:

"I need some help here. My friend has a virus infection at his computer at work. When he runs a DOS program he gets a message about this cereal will taste better with a little milk ...He cannot access Windows 95 at all and once in a while a Star Wars effect will come on the screen."

"People generally grow out of virus writing," says Smith. "There's the adolescent thrill associated with the tacit understanding that bystanders are intimidated by the activity. Older virus writers have much more to lose from negative publicity. Often they have respectable jobs and families. For example there was an Australian virus writer, Screaming Radish, who had a house, a family, and a lucrative job as a programmer."

After his NoFrills virus hit the ATO, Haines was interviewed by the police, but was never charged.

In the UK, with its more comprehensive laws on computer crime, another 21-year-old went down for 18 months in late 1995. Chris Pile, who went by the handle Black Baron, was told by the judge: "Those who seek to wreak mindless havoc on one of the vital tools of our age cannot expect lenient treatment."

Pile's defence called him a "sad recluse".

That could not have been said of Clint Haines. But he never had time to put his dangerous obsession behind him.

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