Love Bug: The Conspiracy
by Brad King

3:00 a.m. May. 6, 2000 PDT

The cops are closing in on the suspected author of the "ILOVEYOU" worm, but not everyone is convinced they are looking for the right person.

While law enforcement agencies scoured the capital of the Philippines looking for the young man known as Spyder and whose first name may be Michael, amateur sleuths plugged in their paranoid radars and starting tracking a list of more likely culprits.

The wannabe flatfoots have largely eschewed such cumbersome details as facts to back up their claims. Instead, they have relied loosely on the theory of Occam's razor, which states that the best explanation of an event is the simplest one.

The key word here: simple.

What they have compiled are the people most likely to benefit from Thursday's viral outbreak.

First up is the Recording Industry Association of America, which stands to benefit the most from the bug. The RIAA is embroiled in a lawsuit with Napster, the application that allows music files to be traded by setting up one-to-one user connections.

Because the bug invades MP3 files and corrupts them, some people might be dissuaded from downloading files from strangers.

"The two most popular files traded on the net are JPEGs and MP3s," said Daryl G. Berg, said Vice President of Strategic Planning for The Orchard. "It's brilliantly evil and so simple. Even if only two or three people are still infected at the end of the day, people aren't going to know what kind of files they are going to get when they use an application like Napster."

RIAA President "Hillary Rosen must be dancing around in her underwear today because this is the greatest day for the industry," Berg said.

There was even some discussion that Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, whose band also is suing Napster, might have spent some time learning code.

More likely, another theorist speculated in an email, the recording industry hired a patsy.

"I say someone tied directly to the music industry took matters into their own hands," wrote Mike Lane. "They sent what everyone is calling a virus, but it's really a Trojan horse. This horse's goal is to destroy MP3 files, but it can't look like that is all it is doing. Since the entire Internet uses HTML and JPG files (and is the root cause of all the problems), it is going to attack them as well. This way it doesn't look so suspicious."

Never mind that the worm doesn't actually destroy MP3 files, and that recovering your digital music library is rather simple. This isn't about that kind of detail.

Then there are those with a stake in JPEG files. And who would benefit from a massive loss of digital pictures more than the porn industry?

Pornographers stand to make a huge chunk of change now that JPEG files have been corrupted, writes Raffi, yet another worm theorist. Most people probably don't have back-up porn files, he posits, so it would be a boon to the industry if someone could delete all of the nudie pictures on hard drives.

"As the virus attacks JPEG files, people who have saved pornographic material on their hard drives will now have to re-access these sites to download it again," he wrote.

Let's face it though, people are downloading porn -- and lots of it. Why go to the trouble to make the public do something they are already doing and risk getting caught by the G-men?

That brings us to the one person who is powerful enough to create the worm, who has access to the Microsoft Outlook source code, and who might want to bring the world to its collective knees after enduring a rough couple of weeks.

That man is Bill Gates. He's had a tough stretch, losing his antitrust trial to the feds and then watching archrival Larry Ellison overtake him as the world's richest man. He might be a little ticked off. Several readers wrote emails suggesting Uncle Bill is the man behind the bug.

"To date, I haven't seen a single report in any medium which points out the most obvious point," wrote Seldolivaw Ssov in an email. "Maybe we should use some other mail client less prone to the kind of security holes that cost us several million dollars every time a script kiddie flexes his muscles!

"The point is that the ROOT cause of these mass virus proliferations is a pathetically insecure email client foisted upon the public by a certain evil monopoly whose name I need not mention."

Of course, she goes on to mention the company, and even includes more willing accomplices in this latest attack.

"I don't know how much Microsoft is paying the media to refrain from pointing this out, but it must be one heck of a lot."