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Hi, I was the UCLA Engineering student who isolated the Westwood virus. There are a number of factual errors in this article. Among other things, though the virus was positively identified as the "Friday The 13th" virus, it did not in fact have a payload that was triggered on Friday the 13th. It was identified as the Friday The 13th virus because the threats recieved by the UC system (which referred to a "Friday 13th virus") were known to have come from disgruntled Taiwanese hardware suppliers, and the original floppy with the infected speed.com program was traced to one of them. The note about the small box appearing on the screen is also erroneous. The virus was easy to isolate because it left a characteristic string in all infected .com and .exe files which was easy to detect. The virus never spread because it was never installed on any computers that were connected to the internet, since very few computers were connected in those days. Most infections were due to people "playing" with the virus... It was very easy to recover from a virus in those days since a hard drive was only 10Mb.
BTW, the SEASnet offered to name the virus after me, but I declined because I was afraid people would think I was responsible for it. UCLA apparently felt the same, so the virus was called "Westwood" since that wouldn't implicate any individual or group, but would make it clear that it had been discovered at UCLA. It was NOT called the Friday The 13th Virus, because the imputed payload did not actually exist. So the only effect of the virus was to infect files and to render Microsoft Word unusable.
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