Computer Viruses On Friday 13th – 1989

I wasn’t really aware of computer viruses until the early 2000s when viruses such as Nimda and ILOVEYOU got a lot of attention so I find it interesting to learn that computer viruses were causing problems in the 80s when the world wasn’t half as connected as it was by the end of the millenium.

There’s not much technical details included in this news report video It mentions two logic bombs that are activated on Friday 13th and shows how one of these viruses (I’m guessing “Data Crime”) caused damaged to the UK’s Royal National Institute for the Blind which, at the time, was helping blind people use computers.

This Computer Knowledge article on the 1989 Datacrime virus [1] has more information:

> … on any day after October 12th, it would trigger a low level format of cylinder zero of the hard disk, which would, on most hard disks, wipe out the File Allocation Table, and leave the user effectively without any data. It would also display the virus’ name: Datacrime virus.

It looks like the 1989 “Data crime” virus was not notable enough to be included in Wikipedia’s Timeline of computer viruses and worms [2] – though the Jerusalem virus is included under 1987:

> The Jerusalem virus, part of the (at that time unknown) Suriv family, is detected in the city of Jerusalem. The virus destroys all executable files on infected machines upon every occurrence of Friday the 13th (except Friday 13 November 1987 making its first trigger date May 13, 1988). Jerusalem caused a worldwide epidemic in 1988.

I suspect the Wikipedia author meant “panic” when they wrote “epidemic” as they refer to this article on Computer Viruses by Rob Wentworth [3] which has a lot more information about the Jerusalem virus. Wikipedia has a substantial article specifically about the Jerusalem virus [4] which explains how it works and lists some of its many variants.

Regarding Data Crime, this NCSM India article [5] says that

> Data crime virus is similar to Jerusalem and was programmed to attack on October 13, 1989. Track zero of computer hard disc is destroyed and the contents of discs are rendered unreadable. This virus enters COM and EXE files and damages the hard disc. And antidote called ‘V Checker’ was developed by the American Computer Society. Fortunately the virus was located in March 1989 itself and the damage reported after October 13 was minimal. The Royal National institute for the Blind, UK was the worst hit and much data was reported to be lost.

This description [6] concurs with [2] and [5]:

> The DataCrime virus caused much panic around Oct. 13th 1989 when it was set to go off. Any infected program run on Oct. 13 or later in the year would format the first nine tracks of the hard disk and display the message

    DATACRIME VIRUS RELEASED: 1 MARCH 1989

1. https://www.cknow.com/cms/vtutor/1989-datacrime.html

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_computer_viruses_a...

3. https://web.archive.org/web/20131224165244/http://uanr.com/a...

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem_(computer_virus)

5. https://www.ncsmindia.com/chapter-5-computer-viruses/

6. https://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/datacrim.shtml