
An Ultimate Chaos Interview 

Victim's Handle: SPo0Ky, right? 
UC Rep's Handle: Rhape79 
Date: 03/29/99 

Before we begin is there anything you would like to confess? 

better not, you? 

01. Who are you, what do you do, what kind of music do you like etc.. and how 
did you get your nick? 

I am... well, I am SPo0Ky, a virus author, virus collector and 
founder/webmaster of The Codebreakers. 
I think I have got my name Spooky about 2 1/2 years ago, till now it changed 
from Spooky to SPo0Ky... thats because a friend once made a typo (o/0) and I 
thought it looks good :-) 
I work for a company in Austria (which also answers the 2nd question), my job 
has absolutly nothing to do with computers, though I'm occasionally doing some 
small C++ projects for companies in my sparetime - sparetime, thats something I 
don't have alot of. However I spend most of it for my hobbies, which are 
programming and reading books - certainly mostly computer related books, right 
now I'm almost at the end of Applied Cryptography (can really recommend this 
one to anyone interrested in cryptography) and in the middle of some 1300 pages 
MFC book. 
Music... hmm, I'm not very choosy about the type of music (well, I prefer 
german punk music, but sometimes I even listen to classic music), I just need 
*something* to listen to while programming. This is getting too long, I still 
have 22 emails in my mailbox to answer (probably lots of complains about 
codebreakers.org) next question please :-) 

02. Where are you from? 

Austria :) 

03. How would you describe yourself (eg. mad, antisocial, above average 
intelligence etc..)? 

very lazy (way too lazy to do any sports or to go out very often on saturday 
evening), I'm also kinda sloppy, the only thing tiddied up here is my HDD ;-) 

Antisocial? Only while writing viruses, the rest of the time I'm a rather nice 
and helpful guy ;-) 

04. How did you get involved in the VX scene? 

It's the fault of Parity_Boot.B's author, I got infected by it, knew nothing 
about computers, formated my drives several times, learned quite some new 
things, and finally learned to love these fascinating little bugs :-) 

05. Are you part of any VX team, if so which one(s) and fer how long? 

I'm the founder of the VX groups The Codebreakers, everything started on the 
6th September 1997 

06. How many viruses have you written to date? 

Exactly 52, excluding 3 which are still in 'the lab' 

07. What do you see as the future fer yourself (and your team(s))? 

I have no f*ckin clue! ;-] 

08. What languages do you know? 

I started with Pascal and QBasic which was included in MS-DOS. These two were my 
primary languages for a long time, later I thaught myself Assembler, Visual 
Basic (and all these things like VBA/VBS) and C/C++ (where Assembler and C are 
still my prefered languages). 

09. Are there any viruses in particular which you think were good (eg. great 
survival, stealth, encryption etc..)? 

Well, I have to say that I really like how W97M.Melissa is travelling around 
the globe right now, such a simple piece of code, yet so powerful. I also like 
the CIH family, Spanska's viruses, and this neat Smiley virus which was 
released in some 40hex mag :-) 

10. What do you think of viral payloads - and more specifically destructive 
payloads? 

I like creative payloads, like Spanska's and VicodinES's... destructive ones 
are too boring to look at (excluding the CIH payload, this one was 
interesting) 

11. Unique question here - Can you describe the perfect virus? 

No sorry :-) 

12. What is your opinion of pro-virus members/groups, and why? 

I certainly like my own group, in September 97 I started it with some newbies, 
till today we became very good friends, released quite some interesting code 
in many new fields of virus coding, and are probably publishing the only 
magazine to get *anyone* interested in virus writing started. 

I also respect 29A, Phalcon/SKISM and VLAD for their great code. 

13. What is your opinion of anti-virus members/companies, and why? 

AVP and F-Prot are the best in my opinion, they are cheap, have high detection 
rates, very good heuristics, good support, no bad marketing techniques (ok ok, 
AVP has some.. but... :) I really dislike NAI/McAfee for their marketing 
techniques, they are just trying to get the money from their customers - bad 
support/bad product. 

14. If Microsoft offered you a job to work on MSAV - Would you take it? 

I'd not need one minute to make my decission to work for an AV company or not, 
answer would definitelly be yes (doesn't make a big difference for me, I'm 
interrested in viruses, no matter if I write them myself or if I earn money by 
studying other's virus codes), but at MSAV and McAfee I'd rather say NO. 

15. Are there any pro-virus members/groups you'd like to greet? 

All CodeBreakers - great team 
All the people I'm trading viruses with, including the ones from the AV side 
;-) 

Groucho - Not a pro-virus member, but I have to greet him anyway! :) 
RAiD - for getting us a new, free webpage! 
Flitnic, Lord Arz, Probex, Black Jack - austrian virus coders 
VicodinES - nice one bro ;-) 
Foxz - Long no talking :-( 
Jerk1n - thanks for 'the big one' 
Rhape - thanks for the interview :) 

I forgot you? Sorry :-) 

16. Are there any anti-virus members/companies you'd like to greet? 

Some of the support people at AVP (including Eugene himself), also Peter Szor 
from Datafellows (very knowledgeable person) and last but not least my friend 
Looi :-) 

17. This is your bit to say what ever you like (announce your next virus, tell 
us about your team, whatever...) 

*It's 1:26am now, and I have to be at work at 7am today ;-]* 

well, my next one will be a combination of a macro/win32 virus with (as 
always) some special features. Just keep reading alt.comp.virus ;-) 

Thank you fer taking the time to do this interview. 
