GOING VIRAL

There are parallels between the spread of computer viruses and misinformation on social media. The latest example is the reaction to the WHO announcement on Covid

n May 5, the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared that Covid is no longer a global health emergency. WHO head Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said: “Yesterday, the emergency committee met for the 15th time and recommended to me that I declare an end to the public health emergency of international concern. I’ve accepted that advice. It is therefore with great hope that I declare Covid-19 over as a global health emergency.”

That’s good news indeed, but not as good as some people immediately chose to believe.

Tedros also said: “The worst thing any country can do now is to use this news as a reason to let down its guard, to dismantle the systems it has built, or to send the message to its people that Covid-19 is nothing to worry about.”

Three days later a South African radio host reportedly told his audience that the WHO had said Covid was over, and that “there’s not a trace of this thing left”.

I’m getting this from what we could loosely term a “source” on social media, and I didn’t hear the statement myself. But I’m tempted to believe it, given that I’ve seen the usual antivaxxers spreading the same message all over social media, telling people who are still concerned about boosters and precautions that the “WHO has said Covid is over, so stop being so paranoid”.

You will have noticed the irony that many of the people quoting the WHO

Olike this have spent the past few years telling us that we’re stupid to trust the organisation.

There are even people who claim that the WHO is just saying Covid is over because it can’t sustain the lie that it actually ever existed.

As one Twitter user put it: “The WHO says Covid is over. The thing that is now over, never was. It was a trick. A slight [sic] of hand. A ‘how to lie with statistics’. And yet you believed. Because you were told to believe.”

Let me remind you that this is a virus that, according to the WHO, killed at least 7-million people, with

Tedros saying the true number of deaths was likely closer to 20-million.

Why do we have people who still insist on spreading lies, such as the one that Covid is over or, more extremely, that it never existed?

In a sense, lies are themselves viruses, of course, and proliferate in the same way. But what kind of person decides to put that virus into the world, and why?

This question occurred to me while reading an edited extract, in The Guardian, of a new book by Scott J Shapiro called Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Informa

tion Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks (due to be published on May 23). The extract itself was titled, even more grandiloquently than the book, “On the trail of the Dark Avenger: the most dangerous virus writer in the world”.

The extract is about the early days of computer viruses, and specifically about Bulgaria in the 1980s, when the country was known as the “virus factory”. It also addresses the question, though perhaps never really convincingly answers it, of who was creating them, and what drove them to do so.

It will be instructive to look back at the innocent days of computer viruses, before humans themselves became the virus that infects systems and here I’m referring to the system we call truth. Perhaps we can learn something from history for a change, instead of just being doomed to rewrite it on a whim to suit our current agendas.

One of the two central figures in the

story is a mysterious hacker known as the Dark Avenger.

When interviewed years afterwards, the Dark Avenger claimed that, “in those days, there were no viruses being written in Bulgaria, so I decided to write the first. In early March 1989 it came into existence and started to live its own life, and to terrorise all engineers and other suckers.”

To this day, we don’t know who the Dark Avenger was or is. But, according to Shapiro, he and his compatriots unleashed hundreds of computer viruses, and people at the time spoke of a “Bulgarian virus factory”, “a loose collective of young Bulgarian men (they were all men) who were highly intelligent and bored. Writing viruses became a source of intellectual stimulation and a form of social distinction.”

The difference between Dark Avenger’s virus (named Eddie, after the skeleton mascot of metal band Iron Maiden, if you’re looking for a hacker stereotype) and those that had come before, was, in the words of the author, that “Dark Avenger built his to be lethal”.

“When a user ran a program infected with Eddie, the virus would not start by attacking other files. It would lurk in computer memory and hand back control to the original program. However, when a user loaded another program, skulking Eddie would spring into action and infect that program. These infected programs would be Eddie’s new carriers.

“Eddie also packed a payload that slowly and silently destroyed every file it touched. When the infected program was run the 16th time, the virus overwrote a random section of the disk in the computer with its calling card: ‘Eddie lives ... somewhere in time.’ After enough of these indiscriminate changes, programs on the disk stopped loading.”

This could serve as a metaphor for the way untruths work on social media. Saying something dumb on a radio show, to the effect that Covid has disappeared, is like a computer virus that lurks in the system. The next time someone, an antivaxxer say, denies the existence of Covid, they might quote a source such as a radio programme they listened to. And that lie will then lurk, like Eddie, until it’s activated again in another context.

After enough lies built upon lies, truth will become the program that stops loading.

To stretch the analogy even further, “because Eddie infections took a while to produce symptoms, users spread the virus and backed up contaminated files. When users discovered that their disk had turned into digital sawdust, they also learned that their backups were badly damaged. Dark Avenger had invented what are now called ‘data diddling’ viruses viruses that alter data in files.”

The problem with misinformation is not always the actual unit of misinformation. It’s that people can no longer trust their backup system, as it were.

The entire edifice of truth is compromised for them.

Shapiro tells us that “Dark Avenger’s obscurity was a harbinger of things to come. A new generation would use a veil of anonymity to act with total impunity. And they would flood the emerging world wide web with new species of self-reproducing malware far more destructive than anything Dark Avenger created, many of which we are still living with today.”

Are the people who deliberately spread falsehoods and misinformation today in some way the spiritual descendants of those original hackers? Are they doing it for the same reasons, just because they’re bored and angry, and because it’s a way of validating their existence?

A researcher asked the Dark Avenger (the more I write “Dark Avenger”, the sillier it sounds) why he wrote destructive viruses, and how he would feel if one of his viruses was used by someone else to cause a tragic incident.

He answered: “I am sorry for it. I never meant to cause tragic incidents. I never imagined that these viruses would affect anything outside computers. I used the nasty words because the people who wrote to me said some very nasty things to me first.”

In many cases I’m excluding such cases as those who spread information for profit, or state-driven influence operations I can’t help thinking that the people who choose to spread misinformation must have similar reasons. They’re just retaliating because they think someone, somewhere a person, a government, the Illuminati is picking on them, and they’re retaliating in some strange way. Or else they don’t actually understand the damage they can do. In the case of the Dark Avenger, to the users of computers; in our case, to the citizens of democracies at the very least.