Тёмный Мститель: История создателя компьютерных вирусов из Болгарии.

Computer virus writer
a computer virus writer

Dark Avenger was the pseudonym of a computer virus writer from Sofia, Bulgaria. He gained considerable notoriety during the early 1990s when his viruses spread internationally.

During the Cold War, the Bulgarian government authorized projects to reverse engineer Western technology. This eventually led to the Pravetz computers of the 1980s, which cloned popular Western personal computers. A community formed around these computers when they were used in schools to teach students computer programming. In April 1988, Bulgaria's trade magazine for computers, Компютър за Вас (Computer for You), published a translation of a German article about computer viruses and methods for writing them. At the time, Bulgaria did not have any laws against writing computer viruses. and Bulgarian security researcher Vesselin Bontchev blamed the viruses on the country's history of pirating Western computer code and failure to teach students about computer ethics.

The identity of the person behind the pseudonym has never been ascertained. Gordon herself attributed his motivation to a hatred of Bontchev. Dark Avenger's profile was raised substantially by a 1997 story in Wired, in which the journalist David S. Bennahum attempted to track down Dark Avenger. Bennahum did not uncover Dark Avenger's identity but came to suspect the operator of a Bulgarian bulletin board system that collected computer viruses in the 1990s. Neither he nor someone who claimed to be Dark Avenger would say whether this was true.