And the Hi, I'm Rand Levy.

Welcome to the Malicious Life Podcast.

Here's in hypothetical. What's the most embarrassing thing you could think of doing?

Freezing up in the middle of a stage performance, having the pants of your ass rip in public?

Happened to me once in fifth grade.

Yeah, still remember that one.

What about accidentally sending pornography

to 50 of your closest friends and family.

Yes, including your colleagues, your secret crush, even Nana.

I think we can agree that would be very unpleasant to deal with.

And it happened to a hundred thousand people in May of 1999.

Malware was a budding industry in the 1990s, but most of it shared one core problem.

Means of distribution.

There were file viruses which infected exe file types on a local system,

boot sector virus which transferred from one computer to another via floppy disks,

macro viruses which leveraged Microsoft Office macros to spread between documents

on a computer and more.

But just as these viruses were starting to pop up, Microsoft was patching their programs to cover up security

holes and companies were designing antivirus softwares.

And really if floppy disks are the means by which your virus spreads, you're not just casting a white enough net.

What black hats were really missing was an efficient means of transfer. A channel you could heat you a malignant

code to then let it work its magic from there. That way you wouldn't just wreck one

...