Festering Hate

Festering Hate (also known as hate) and CyberAIDS are the names of the first two Apple ProDOS viruses. CyberAIDS appears to have been a series of viruses with minor changes in the code, culminating in the final version called Festering Hate, which appeared in 1988 (The Festering Hate World Tour - Festering Hate in '88). When the virus went off, the title page credited "Rancid Grapefruit" and "Cereal Killer" of the "Kool/Rad Alliance!"

The phone number embedded in the detonation page was apparently the home number of John Maxfield (also known as "Cable Pair") a well-known FBI informant and private investigator of the era, whose specialty was computer crime and hackers.

Unlike the few Apple viruses that had come before, such as the Elk Cloner virus, that were essentially annoying but did no damage, the Festering Hate series of viruses was extremely destructive, spreading to all system files it could find on the host computer (hard drive, floppy and system memory) and then destroying everything when it could no longer find any uninfected files.

Although there are references and message threads about CyberAIDS appearing on Usenet as early as 1985 and 1986, CyberAIDS seems to have attained critical mass in 1987 when it finally spread out of the pirate underground, where the payload was originally attached to cracked software, and hit the mainstream networks of the time and began affecting legitimate users.

Festering Hate was the last of the CyberAIDS code-base and seems to have bridged the virus from underground pirate BBS systems to the mainstream, by way of a shareware telecommunications application called Zlink. In fact, the original impression was that Zlink itself was nothing but a Trojan horse that delivered a viral payload.

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